Visionaries
Stratis Batagias
Founders-Manna
Arcadia, Peloponnese, Greece
High in the fir forests of Arcadia stands a building that once treated tuberculosis patients in the 1920s. Stratis Batagias first explored the abandoned sanatorium as a child while attending summer camp nearby. For decades the building stood silent, slowly reclaimed by forest. Thirty years later, when the property was finally put to state auction, he returned to bring it back to life.
The Story of Stratis Batagias
High in the fir forests of Arcadia stands a former mountain sanatorium that remained abandoned for decades before Stratis Batagias began imagining what it could become.
Watch the FilmOrigin
Raised between Athens and the mountain region of Arcadia, where his family has deep roots. The abandoned sanatorium hidden in the forest would eventually become the project that defined his life.
Former Life
Studied marketing in Athens and spent years working in his family's retail business. He was not from hospitality. The reason he became a hotelier was this building and only this building.
The Turning Point
In 2014, during the Greek financial crisis, the abandoned mountain sanatorium was placed in a state auction. Stratis bought the building and began the restoration that would take nearly nine years.
Obsession
Preserving the atmosphere of the original sanatorium while allowing the building to evolve naturally, ensuring the architecture remained deeply connected to the forest landscape around it.
The Detail
Materials were carefully chosen to age naturally, allowing the building to feel as though it had always belonged to the forest and mountains that surround the sanatorium.
What They Preserved
The original sanatorium structure, its material memory, and the forest that had grown around it during eighty years of abandonment. Stone from the mountain above, ageing plaster techniques, and the building’s quiet relationship with the landscape were all preserved rather than replaced.
Home is where your heart is mostly, and my heart is here now. I grew up walking these mountains, and when I first entered the abandoned sanatorium as a child I felt something that never left me. Bringing it back to life was never only about restoring a building, it was about restoring a place that had always belonged to this landscape.
The Story of Manna Arcadia
Home is where your heart is mostly, and my heart is here now.
The building that is now MANNA was originally constructed in 1929 as a tuberculosis sanatorium. Patients came here for clean mountain air and quiet recovery among the fir trees of Arcadia. After decades of abandonment, the building remained structurally strong but deeply weathered by time and forest.
The building that is now MANNA was originally constructed in 1929 as a tuberculosis sanatorium. Patients came here for clean mountain air and quiet recovery among the fir trees of Arcadia. After decades of abandonment, the building remained structurally strong but deeply weathered by time and forest.
“I could feel an energy there even when I was ten, walking through the abandoned sanatorium hidden in the forest.”
Stratis’s connection to Arcadia runs deeper than memory, shaped by the summers he spent exploring the forests and mountains surrounding the old sanatorium. As a child he would walk through the abandoned building with friends from a nearby summer camp, sensing a strange brightness in a place that had stood silent for decades. When he returned years later, the scent of fir trees, the cool mountain air and the quiet stillness of the landscape felt unchanged, as though the building had simply been waiting for someone who understood it. Restoring Manna became less about creating a hotel and more about protecting the spirit of the place, allowing the architecture, the forest and the calm rhythm of the mountains to remain inseparable.
