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Manakia Brothers

Summary: Yannakis (Ianache) Manakia (b. 1878) and Miltos Manakia (b. 1882), widely considered the first professional film operators in the Balkan Peninsula. Born in Avdella (in today's Greek Pindus mountains) into a Vlach family of stock-farmers; born Ottoman citizens, they died as citizens of different sovereign states. Their collection of moving images and photographs is the central case study of chapter-1-crisis-and-nationalism and is referenced from chapters 2, 3, and 4. Their archival treatment is the paradigm case of marmarization and the negative-positive pole for the boundary-archive concept.

Sources: cinema-of-marbles-draft-2025-12-30.md, primarily sections 1.0–1.1.4 (lines 6–741); also referenced at the Thessaloniki Cinema Museum (Ch 2, lines 1496–1568) and the vlihi reading (Ch 3).

Last updated: 2026-05-24.

Biography

Yannakis and Miltos Manakia were born the youngest of seven siblings in Avdella, in a mountainous Vlach region of modern-day Greece. Their family had a photographic studio in Ioannina from 1898 (Christodoulou 1997). The studio was renamed Atelier of Artistic Imagination and relocated to Bitola (Monastir, then Ottoman) in 1906 after Ottoman pressure. Yannakis bought their first camera — a 35mm Bioscope N. 300 made by Charles Urban and Company — during a 1906 Paris trip funded by their prizes at the 1906 Bucharest International Exhibition (Tutui 2008).

They began filming in 1905 in Avdella (or 1907, depending on source). Yannakis was exiled to Filippoupoli (modern Plovdiv) 1916–19 after Central Powers agents found firearms in the studio. After the First World War, they bought a plot in Bitola where they built a two-floor cinema theater that was destroyed by a projector fire in 1939.

Yannakis moved to Thessaloniki in 1935, worked as a teacher at the Romanian school, abandoned the moving image, and died in 1954. Miltos stayed in Bitola until his death in 1964 and was celebrated as a key figure in the country's film culture. In 1951, Miltos copied around 1,500 metres of their film stock at the Yugoslav Cinémathèque of the Macedonian State Archive for one million Yugoslav dinars.

The collection

  • Photographs: approximately twelve thousand portraits across 125 Balkan locations, acquired by Bitola's Regional Historical Archive (an administrative entity with no exhibition space).
  • Moving images: forty documentaries according to the catalogue (forty-seven titles per other counts), held primarily by the Cinémathèque of Macedonia in Skopje. Subject matter: everyday rural and urban life of Balkan populations, ceremonies, anonymous people, and political-military events including the Balkan Wars and the First World War.
  • The brothers' first film, The Weavers, captures their grandmother Despo at a hand loom.

The Hellenization of the name

The birth certificate reads Manaki rather than Manakia — a Hellenized ending that erased the Vlach identity marker (Vlach speakers were "mainly transhumant shepherds speaking a Latin-based language ... largely marginalized by other local communities," Livanios 2008). Mademli treats this name-change as the first archival operation performed on the collection.

Material specificity

The Bioscope 300 used a film stock with ample perforations — the line separating frames runs through the perforations rather than between them, deviating by roughly two millimeters from era standards (Stardelov 1997). When run through a standard projector, the footage flickers and hops on the horizontal axis. This is the dissertation's central material example of how a boundary-archive is materially constituted. The chapter reads the flicker as a metaphor for political instability on the Greece / North Macedonia border.

Restoration trip to Budapest

Igor Stardelov, head curator at the Cinémathèque of Macedonia, recounts driving the nitrate film stock from Skopje to a Budapest laboratory because no Yugoslav projector/printer could handle the non-standard perforation. The drive happened in the aftermath of Yugoslav civil war, with police escort. This trip is the source of the chapter's reading of "the destabilized, flickering image" as both political-geographical metaphor and archival fact.

The 2014 FIAF DVD

The 70th congress of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), held in Skopje in 2014 — the same year as the "Skopje 2014" capital-redevelopment launch — premiered the digitally restored Manakia collection at Kino Milenium and distributed an anniversary DVD to FIAF members as gift-economy memorabilia. The chapter reads this event as the canonical marmarization of the Manakia legacy: digitization deployed as "national mission" rather than as archival emancipation.

Cultural afterlives

  • Ulysses Gaze (Theo Angelopoulos, 1995) — fictionalizes a search for two missing Manakia reels and is treated as the literary midwife of the Manakia-as-national-Greek-heritage discourse.
  • Milton Manakia's statue in the main square of Bitola (delivered no earlier than 2007), with the camera-tripod fused with a cut tree whose legs become roots.
  • The Manakaki festival in Bitola, supported by the North Macedonian Ministry of Culture, celebrated its 46th edition in September 2025.

Connections across the dissertation

  • Ch 2: A whole "sequence" of the thessaloniki-cinema-museum's 1997 exhibition is built around Manakia. The wallpaper still from The Weavers is ornamented with a touchable metal film-reel spool. A non-functional replica of the Bioscope 300 stands in the next room.
  • Ch 3: vlihi's opening sequence references "the nomadic origins of cinema in the region, as per the legacy of the Manakia brothers."
  • Ch 4: The Cyclades / nomad / Vlach lineage continues to inform archipelagic-thinking.

Key sources cited

Christodoulou 1997 (in Greek); Exarhos 1991 (in Greek); Tutui 2008; Liontis 1996; Stardelov 1997; Grgić 2015 and 2022 (haptic visuality in Balkan archives); Arslan 2011; Özgen and Rongen-Kaynakçı 2022 (Ottoman archive heritage).