Romani Musicians in Ottoman and Turkish Music

The history of Ottoman and Turkish music cannot be told without Romani musicians. For centuries, Roma communities across Anatolia, Thrace, and the Balkans have served as professional performers, transmitters, and innovators within the region's modal traditions. Their role has been simultaneously central and marginalized — indispensable to the music's survival yet frequently excluded from the prestige attached to it.

Professional musicians in a multi-ethnic empire

Established The Ottoman Empire's musical culture was produced by musicians from many ethnic and religious communities — Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and Roma among them. Feldman documents the multiethnic character of Ottoman court music, where professional skill rather than ethnic origin determined a musician's standing. Non-Muslim communities contributed composers, performers, and theorists across the classical tradition.

Attested Romani musicians occupied a particular professional niche. Historical records indicate that after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Muslim Roma were incorporated into Ottoman institutions, and Romani musicians contributed to the mehter, the Ottoman military band tradition. Beyond the court, Roma served as the primary professional musicians at weddings, circumcision celebrations, and other public festivities — roles that required command of both art music repertoire and popular genres.

Established Seeman's ethnographic research in western Turkey documents how Romani musicianship constitutes what she terms a "cosmopolitan social formation" — not an isolated folk tradition but a professional practice shaped by centuries of engagement with the broader Ottoman and Turkish musical world. Roma musicians did not simply play their own music for their own communities; they served as the performers who brought the wider tradition to public audiences.

Sulukule: the oldest Roma settlement in Europe

Established Sulukule, a quarter adjacent to Istanbul's Theodosian walls in the Fatih district, is documented as one of the oldest permanently settled Romani communities in Europe, with roots extending to the Byzantine era. The Athinganoi — the Greek term from which "Romani" is partly derived — are recorded as living outside Constantinople's walls as early as the eleventh century.

Attested Under Ottoman rule, Sulukule developed into a center of Romani cultural production. Its entertainment houses became renowned venues where Romani musicians and dancers performed for audiences from across the city. This tradition continued into the twentieth century, making Sulukule synonymous with Istanbul's Romani musical identity.

Established The closure of Sulukule's entertainment houses in 1992 precipitated economic decline in the neighborhood. Beginning in 2005, municipal authorities announced urban renewal plans, and forced evictions started in 2008. The demolition and gentrification of Sulukule displaced the Romani community and ended a continuous cultural tradition spanning centuries — a loss documented by urban scholars as a case study in the erasure of minority cultural heritage through development.

Roman havasi and popular genres

Attested Roman havasi — literally "Romani tune" or "Romani air" — refers to the instrumental dance music associated with Turkish Romani musicians. It is not a makam but a genre: a repertoire of dance tunes characterized by driving rhythms, virtuosic instrumental ornamentation, and an energy oriented toward communal celebration rather than contemplative listening.

Established Roma bands in Turkey are particularly known for music in 9/8 meter — one of the aksak (limping) rhythmic patterns that distinguish Turkish and Balkan music from the symmetrical meters of Western and Arabic traditions. The 9/8 grouping, typically subdivided as 2+2+2+3 or related patterns, drives the dance repertoire and represents one of the most recognizable sonic markers of Turkish Romani performance. The usul framework of Ottoman classical music includes multiple aksak patterns; Romani musicians brought these asymmetric rhythms into popular and festive contexts.

Attested Ciftetelli — from the Turkish ciftetelli, meaning "double-stringed" — is another genre closely associated with Romani performance. Originating in Anatolia, it is a slow, sensuous dance rhythm that spread throughout the Ottoman world and beyond. While not exclusively Romani, ciftetelli performance has long been a professional specialty of Roma musicians across Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans.

The clarinet tradition

Established The clarinet became the signature instrument of Turkish Romani music in the twentieth century, displacing the zurna (a double-reed instrument traditionally used at outdoor celebrations). The clarinet's capacity for microtonal inflection, rapid ornamentation, and sustained melodic lines made it ideally suited to the Romani performance style — and a succession of Romani clarinetists elevated it to virtuosic prominence.

Established Mustafa Kandirali (1930--2020) performed across classical Turkish art music, folk music, and Romani music with equal authority. His mastery of the clarinet in all three domains demonstrated the fluency with which Romani musicians moved between registers of the Turkish musical world. He performed internationally at jazz festivals, bringing Turkish Romani clarinet playing to global audiences.

Established Selim Sesler (1957--2014), from a Romani family in Kesan, Edirne Province, originally from Drama, Greece — part of the population displaced by the 1923 Greek-Turkish exchange — learned zurna before switching to clarinet as a teenager. He performed at weddings and local celebrations from age fourteen, gaining international recognition through collaboration with Canadian ethnomusicologist Brenna MacCrimmon in the late 1990s. A critic for The Guardian called him "the Coltrane of the clarinet." His music reached wider Turkish audiences through the films Head-On (2004) and Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005).

Established Husnu Senlendirici (b. 1976), from Bergama, represents a multi-generational Romani musical family — both grandfathers and his father were professional musicians. He studied at Istanbul Technical University's State Conservatory of Turkish Music and founded the ensemble Laço Tayfa. His group named "Sulukule" paid tribute to the historic Romani quarter. Senlendirici has worked across traditional Romani music, jazz fusion, and cross-cultural collaboration, continuing the pattern of Romani musicians bridging musical worlds.

Fasil, meyhane, and public performance

Attested The fasil suite — the structured sequence of composed and improvised pieces in a single makam — has historically been performed by Romani musicians in meyhane (tavern) settings. Where the Ottoman court fasil was the domain of elite musicians in the palace, the meyhane fasil brought the same modal tradition to public audiences. Romani musicians were central to this transmission, performing on clarinet, violin, kanun, and darbuka for patrons who might never enter a conservatory.

Established Stokes documents the social dynamics of urban music-making in Istanbul, analyzing how musicians navigate between genres and social registers. Roma musicians occupy a complex position in this landscape: valued for their skill and indispensable to festive and popular musical life, yet frequently associated with low social status. The music they perform is celebrated; the musicians themselves have not always received equivalent recognition.

Contribution and marginalization

Established The tension between Romani musicians' cultural centrality and their social marginalization is a defining theme of scholarship on this subject. Seeman's work examines how Turkish Roma navigate identity through musical practice — how performing serves simultaneously as economic livelihood, community identity, and engagement with the broader Turkish cultural world.

Attested Many Turkish Roma have historically concealed their heritage to gain social acceptance, a pattern documented across multiple studies of Roma communities in Turkey. This concealment extends even to prominent musicians whose Romani background becomes an open secret — acknowledged in musical contexts, downplayed in social ones.

Established The destruction of Sulukule crystallized this contradiction. A neighborhood whose musical tradition had been central to Istanbul's cultural life for centuries was demolished with minimal institutional effort to preserve its heritage. The displacement scattered a community whose musical transmission depended on geographic proximity and intergenerational contact — the same mesk (master-apprentice) method that sustains makam learning more broadly.

Listening honestly

Practice Engaging with Turkish Romani music requires awareness of the dynamics described above. The music is not an exotic curiosity but a professional tradition with deep roots in the same modal system that this site documents. When you hear a Roman havasi performance in 9/8, you are hearing aksak rhythms that connect directly to the usul patterns of Ottoman classical music. When a Romani clarinetist ornaments a melody, the ornamental vocabulary draws on makam practice.

Practice At the same time, treating Romani music as merely a subset of Turkish classical music erases its distinctiveness. Roma musicians have their own aesthetic priorities, their own repertoire, their own performance contexts. The scholarship cited here — Seeman, Stokes, Feldman — offers entry points for understanding this music on its own terms rather than as a footnote to a tradition it helped build.