In this paper, we present Chapar, an event system designed for mobile ad hoc networks that supports the publish/subscribe model as well as point–to–point and point–to–multipoint message delivery. Chapar supports event persistency to resist transient disconnections and network partitioning. Following a cross-layer approach, Chapar is designed as an overlay network that uses Multipoint Relays (MPRs) defined in OLSR, as distributed brokers to disseminate the events in a mobile network. Chapar handles topology changes as it uses the underlaying OLSR routing protocol for message delivery. The implementation performance is promising in the sense that no extra signaling is generated for mobility support and the generated overlay traffic is considerably less than the underlying routing protocol traffic.