Manas is carried by manaschi, reciters recognized within Kyrgyz culture as possessing a distinct and, in traditional description, semi-inspired ability to perform enormous stretches of the epic from memory, often entering a trance-like state of concentration during extended performance. Becoming a manaschi is understood traditionally as involving more than rote memorization, frequently described locally as a calling confirmed through dreams involving Manas himself, which sets the role apart from ordinary oral storytelling within the same culture.
Major manaschi in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced the versions most extensively recorded and studied by scholars, and because performances vary by reciter, region and era, no single recorded text is treated as definitive; comparative study of different manaschi's versions is itself a significant part of modern Manas scholarship. UNESCO has recognized the epic tradition as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity, formal acknowledgment of a performance practice that remains actively taught and transmitted rather than existing only in archived recordings.
Soviet era scholarship produced some of the earliest large scale transcriptions of Manas performances, though the epic's explicitly Kyrgyz national and religious content made it a politically sensitive subject at points during the Soviet period, and its full public celebration, including a state sponsored millennium commemoration in 1995, became possible only after Kyrgyz independence.