As a young boy, Stratis Batagias used to spend his summers at a camp in Arcadia, the central Peloponnese region in mainland Greece where his family’s roots stretch back 200 years. At night, he and other kids would sneak out with flashlights to the long abandoned sanatorium up on the mountain, scaring each other with increasingly lavish ghost stories. But the magic of this neoclassical-inspired building, with the forest growing inside it, bewitched Batayias. ‘Apart from the terrible condition it was in, it had so much energy,’ he remembers. ‘I felt this energy and I dreamed of creating a place where other people could feel it too.’
Manna Hotel, a soothing stay in Arcadia
This 12-year-old’s dream was realised more than 30 years later when Manna opened in July 2023 following a nine-year restoration project. The result is a luxurious mountain refuge that aims to leave its guests feeling soothed and grounded.
First built in 1929 for soldiers suffering from tuberculosis, the handsome building has been reinvigorated using an approach of minimal intervention. ‘The Arcadian ideal is that man never imposes on nature but lives in harmony with it,’ Batayias explains.
A first-time hotelier, he worked with homegrown architectural and design talents, Monogon and K-Studio (the latter also behind the interiors of a Costa Navarino residence in the Peloponnese), who ‘felt the place too’. Manna’s gabled stone façade, an enduring testament to local craftsmanship, has been restored and augmented with an organic-feeling extension that used the same local black stone quarried from the mountain above. The old is cleverly connected to the new via a striking glass walkway, which allows sunlight to flood in and reflects the dense forest outside.
Inside, an earthly palette of colours – including a recurring moss green – and a clutch of natural materials make for ‘healing’ interiors. Chestnut wood is carved into custom furniture and panelling, Peloponnese marble is shaped into staircases, and stone is smoothed into terrazzo flooring. Expansive windows frame the spectacular mountain views, while snug velvets, wools and sheepskin soften the living spaces and bedrooms.
Manna’s decorative flourishes are being added slowly with Batayias building its art collection much like one would in a private home, piece by piece. So far, each work has been commissioned from artists based in Athens in dialogue with Arcadia, an area synonymous with Greek mythology: French sculptor Diane Alexander’s clay bust of the goat-like god Pan, who is said to have roamed this utopia with his nymphs, sits on a giant mantelpiece in the bar; while a trilogy of 3m-high drawings by the Greek artist Nikos Kanoglu dress the main hallway.
The hotel is very much a place to hunker down, especially come winter when the landscape is often blanketed in snow. Guests might drift from the spa’s cave-like pool to the oversized fluffy armchair by the fire, and delve into the vintage book collection with a mug of mountain tea. But it is very much worth venturing out, too: for hikes along the Manailo Trail to stone villages such as Valtesiniko; for hearty lunches cooked over a fire at Taverna Josef in Magouliana; for horse riding, river rafting, or hunting for mushrooms with a local guide.
Before returning, of course, to the sanctuary of Manna: a labour of love of Herculean proportions.
