10 Lei Maria Tănase

Issued to mark the centenary of Maria Tănase's birth, this piece honors Romania's most significant folk and lăutari-influenced vocalist, whose recordings in the 1930s and 1940s preserved regional musical forms that might otherwise have been lost to postwar homogenization under Communist cultural policy. The regime that outlawed much of what she sang permitted her to perform largely because her popularity was simply too vast to suppress — she died in 1963, just before the cultural restrictions of the Ceaușescu years tightened further.