Mangas


Manges is the name of a social group in the Belle Époque era's counterculture of Greece. The nearest English equivalent to the term "mangas" is wide boy, or spiv.

Overview

Mangas was a label for men belonging to the Greek working class, behaving in a particularly arrogant/presumptuous way, and dressing with a very typical vesture composed of a woolen hat, a jacket, a tight belt, stripe pants, and pointy shoes. Other features of their appearance were their long moustache, their bead chaplets, and their idiosyncratic manneristic limp-walking. A related social group were the Koutsavakides ; the two terms are occasionally used interchangeably. Manges are also notable for being closely associated with the history of rebetiko.

Etymology

The three most probable etymologies of the word Mangas are the following:
  • From the Turkish manga "small military troop" via Albanian mangë.
  • From the Latin manica "hand-related".
  • According to a more marginal proposal, its origin is from the Latin mango, -onis "dealer, trader".

    In popular culture

Most rebetiko songs refer to manges, even when this is not explicit, as rebetiko was part of this subculture. Examples are: "Στην Υπόγα", "Ο Μάγκας του Βοτανικού". The admiration of manges was carried on with the later genre of Greek music Laïko. Examples are: "Πού 'σουν μάγκα το Χειμώνα", and others.
Karagiozis shadow plays portray a recurrent character called Stavrakas, Σταύρακας.
In modern Greek language, mangas has become a synonym for "swash guy, swagger" or simply "dude"; depending on context it may have more negative or more positive connotations.