Ramush Muarem – Cirko | In Memoriam

It is with profound grief and a deep sense of loss that the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) mourns the passing of Ramush Muarem – Cirko: journalist, editor, screenwriter, actor, comedian, activist, and one of the most enduring and influential voices of Roma culture in the Balkans and beyond.

Cirko was a Roma cultural figure who asserted the authority to narrate his community’s stories without concession or delay; an artist who not only participated in cultural spaces but actively created and sustained them; and a public intellectual who employed humour, language, and media not solely for entertainment, but as powerful instruments of dignity, resilience, and cultural affirmation.

His passing leaves a profound void that will resonate across generations: in Shuto Orizari, throughout the Balkans, within Roma diaspora communities across Europe, and in every space where audiences gathered to see themselves reflected, affirmed, and uplifted through his work.

A Life Built in Service of Roma Presence

Ramush Muarem — Cirko spent over three decades building Roma cultural and media presence at a time when such work was neither funded nor fashionable. From 1990 to 2015, he served as a radio and television programme editor, a quarter century of commitment to Roma public media at a time when Roma voices in broadcasting were rare, and the infrastructure to sustain them was fragile.

Through the iconic programme Cirkoteka on TV BTR, he created something that did not previously exist in that form: a Roma-authored, Romani-language television format grounded not in institutional representation but in the lived texture of community life,  its humour, its characters, its self-knowledge, its contradictions, its pride. For Roma families across North Macedonia and the broader region, Cirkoteka was not simply a programme. It was a mirror. And for many, it was the first time they saw themselves reflected in the public space without distortion.

Later, as Editor-in-Chief of the Roma Times Web Portal and as a translator working with the Statistical Office, the Ministry of Interior, and the Ministry of Labour of North Macedonia, Cirko continued to insist that the Romani language belonged in formal, institutional, and public lif, not only in community spaces. Every translation he undertook, every institutional document rendered into Romani, was a quiet act of linguistic sovereignty.

Ajgara Bend: Roma Authorship as a Political Act

Central to Cirko’s legacy is his role in Ajgara Bend, the collective of Roma actors, comedians, musicians and cultural producers who created some of the most recognisable Roma comedy and stage formats in the Balkans from within the community itself.

Together with figures such as Dišo, Koljo, Miki and others, Cirko was part of a generation that did not accept the role assigned to Roma in mainstream public culture: the role of subject, of stereotype, of absence. They picked up cameras, took to stages, wrote scripts, composed music, and produced films from within the community and for the community. Their sketches, performances, and recordings travelled through television, live performance, and, in more recent years, through social media and YouTube, reaching Roma audiences not only in North Macedonia but across the Balkans, in Western Europe, and in diaspora communities far from Shuto Orizari.

This was cultural authorship, the act of a community producing its own image, its own humour, its own narrative logic, its own gallery of characters and stories. At a time when Roma were routinely portrayed through the lens of others, Ajgara Bend proved that Roma could be the lens itself. What Ajgara Bend did was demonstrate in practice that cultural self-expression is a form of political resistance, that laughter can be sovereignty, and that a community that produces its own image is a community that cannot be so easily erased.

In 2025, the legacy performance format Paluni Audicija — Audicija 10ka so Kromid, connected with Dišo, Cirko, Koljo and Miki, showed that this work had not become mere nostalgia. Roma audiences turned out, shared, and celebrated, demonstrating that what Ajgara Bend created was not a product of its time but a living cultural inheritance that still carries emotional resonance, collective memory, and community pride.

Sky – Wheel – Earth: Writing Roma History for the Screen

Alongside his television and comedy work, Cirko made one of his most lasting contributions to Roma cultural memory as co-screenwriter of the documentary film Sky – Wheel – Earth, produced by SP BTR and co-produced by Studio 7, with financial support from the Film Agency of North Macedonia.

Shot across fifteen countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Russia, and Turkey, the film is one of the most ambitious Roma documentary projects produced in the region. It brings together historians, linguists, and intellectuals who have dedicated their lives to researching and documenting Roma history, presenting that history with dignity, analytical rigour, and without the deficit framing that too often characterises how Roma stories reach the screen.

A Public Voice Against Division

Cirko was not only a cultural producer. He was a public intellectual, willing to engage with the hardest questions in Macedonian and Roma public life, and willing to do so in his own name. In interviews and public interventions, he spoke forcefully against nationalism, against the humiliation of Roma identity, against the exclusion of Roma from public employment and institutional representation.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, he used irony as a weapon: publishing a satirical text claiming ‘only in Shutka there is no corona’ to expose precisely the opposite truth, that Shutka and its Roma residents had been forgotten by the system, invisible to the institutions that were supposed to serve them. He understood that propaganda and disinformation are threats to Roma communities specifically, communities already marginalised in public discourse and vulnerable to having their realities distorted.

This was characteristic of Cirko’s intelligence: using the tools of public communication, humour, irony, satire, journalism, not to entertain power but to speak truth to it. Not to make Roma palatable to majority audiences, but to make the majority’s indifference impossible to sustain.

Memory as Obligation

The Roma community, Macedonian journalism, and the broader European cultural sphere have lost a figure of singular significance. What endures is a substantial and multifaceted body of work: recordings, sketches, documentary contributions, translations, interviews, performances, and a voice that carried both depth and humanity. Across decades and platforms, his work consistently demonstrated that Roma culture is not peripheral to European culture, but constitutive of it.

ERIAC commits to honouring his legacy: by continuing to document and celebrate the work of Roma cultural producers like him, by ensuring that what he built is not forgotten, and by working every day toward the world he believed in, a world in which Roma are visible, respected, and free to tell their own story with dignity and on their own terms.

May his memory be eternal.