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The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

A four-storey abandoned stone giant in the forest of mount Mainalo, haunted by the old soldiers from the battlefields of Asia Minor and Anatolia.

By Desolation Road

July 1^st, 2020

Inside its frayed walls and under its falling roof, the ‘Mana’ sanatorium seems haunted by the old soldiers that were sent there from the battlefields of Asia Minor and Anatolia, a century ago. So much, that you can almost hear a distant voice, singing vaguely, through an imaginative phonograph that once used to please their tormented souls.

As if they weren’t broken enough by the Greco-turkish war (1919-’22) deep in the mountains of Turkey, and by the bitter breath of Greece’s political division of the time, they then developed hemoptysis too. Tuberculosis. They were sent here to be treated, drinking the Arcadian water, breathing deep inside their lungs the air of Mainalo, and eating the bread of the bakers of Alonistaina village.

Wandering in search of the Mana sanatorium, deep inside the tranquility of mount Mainalo in Central Peloponnese, you may wonder how can you be missing a four-storey abandoned stone giant, rising above the thick forest. But, sooner or later, it will emerge: a majestic fortress deep inside mountainous Arcadia.

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

It’s been three quarters of a century since the cure of tuberculosis. Called white plague (in contrast to the black plague), or phthisis according to Hippocrates, it was an incurable lethal disease at the time - around 20 years before the invention of streptomycin in 1943. Since tuberculosis was contagious, as was discovered in 1882, the patients were isolated in Sanatoriums all around the country.

From the start of the previous century and during the 1920s, when tuberculosis was an epidemic, if a patient was wealthy enough to find shelter to one of these sanatoriums, as was the case all around Europe, he could hope for high-quality care and meditation, and most of all for the precious clean mountainous air.

If he wasn’t, he was doomed to live inside cramped basements in industrial areas or big cities, where the pollution was worsening his disease, accelerating the process of meeting his fate. According to early beliefs, tuberculosis was spreading mainly between the young and the rich, especially the sensitive and gifted ones like the poets, the geniuses that were living a passionate life.

Considering that revolutionary and communist poets like Lenin award-winner Giannis Ritsos or Maria Polydouri were infected, many thought that the burning of the chest was an idiom of a burning soul. But this didn’t last long. Later, the exact opposite becomes clear: it’s a disease for the poor and the impoverished, born inside burrows of low life quality.

In spite of that, some destitute tuberculosis patients managed at the 1920s and 30s to move to Mainalo, and live in small huts built near the mountain’s springs, so they could enjoy the healing virtues of the clean air and waters of the virgin Arcadian nature. And some would manage to find a place in the Mana sanatorium.

This sanatorium, at a place called Korfoxylia at Magouliana village, 1.500 meters high on Mainalo mountain, was one of the best-known in Greece at the time, and one of the largest of the Balkans. Mana is the Greek word for mother, and the Sanatorium took its name from Anna Papadopoulou, who had some years earlier found the organization Mother of the Soldier.

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

She was the sister of Pavlos Melas, one of the leaders of the Greek Struggle for Macedonia against the Bulgarians and Ottoman Turks, preceding the Balkan Wars of 1912 and ’13. Anna Papadopoulou served as a volunteer nurse at a period of constant wars for Greece, up until 1922, and after that she vowed to look after the patient soldiers, especially the ones who came back from Anatolia suffering from tuberculosis.

So, she organized a fundraiser for the erection of the Sanatorium that would eventually take her name. The greatest donors included the Greek community of America (3,5 million drachmas) and of Egypt (1,8 million) and the Spetseropoulos brothers (1,2 million). According to the official website of the Magouliana village, the local newspaper Moreas of Tripolis was writing in its issue of Sunday, November 9th, 1930: "Shall we make her [Anna Papadopoulou’s] portrait? I guess it’s not necessary. She stands out between thousands. Her face, with her raised eyebrows and the pain in her eyes, is sealed by nobility.

Her silhouette is peculiar. Many think of her as a wanderer. Her light blue jacket and her khaki skirt with the wide leather belt cannot be forgotten from anyone who saw her even once. Is you get close to her, then you can find out more. ‘Delicacy isn’t one of my characteristics’, she writes herself, and maybe she is right in a sense. But if you judge her only by the way she acts you’d be wrong. She is a bit rugged and edgy. She can call you a ‘goofy’ at any time. But this has nothing to do with her heart. Her heart is tender and sweet, the heart of a ‘mother’".

The article continued describing the efforts of Anna Papadopoulou to raise the money for the Sanatorium, in Egypt: "She didn’t leave a Greek house or store unvisited, not even one. She was begging, but for the others’ sake. In remember her coming to visit us at the ‘Averofeio’ high school, and the Pricipal presented her to us as ‘the sister of Pavlos Melas, the Mother of the Soldiers’. Then they put an iron box at the exit, and every one of us gave what he could for the Mana Sanatorium. I gave half a franc. That was all I could afford. You can imagine how I felt when I first saw the Sanatorium. My half franc became a tiny stone, of it".

The Sanatorium was built between 1923 and 1925 by the famous stone-builders of Lagadia village, using stones from the nearby Alogovrachos (meaning Horse’s Rock) quarry. Besides stone, they also used plates of concrete, which was necessary for the construction of large balconies for the patients. The Sanatorium consisted of four floors (basement, ground floor and two storeys) covering 2.500 sq.m. in total, and started operating on 1928.

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

"The Sanatorium was something I decided to do in 1919, when I was serving in Aidini (Aydin), and my Cretan colleague Giannis Androulakis suffered haemoptysis. That’s when the Great Idea was born. There rest are known to you", said Anna Papadopoulou herself, who received in total 12 Medals of the Greek state. Fourteen years earlier she became one of the very few women at the time that was awarded the Cross of the Savior, and also the Athens Academy’s Medal of Self-sacrifice for her voluntary service in the war - even when suffering from typhus and toxic anaemia.

During her speech, she said, emotional: "I deliver you my work, for which I made as many sacrifices as I could. If you detect any shortcomings, please be aware that I never lost the good will to bring this work forward. I feel the obligation to request you to always keep this Sanatorium’s purpose, and never turn it into an asylum, because the cause of my fundraiser was to save as many lives as possible, so the patients can return to the society and be useful again".

The Mana Sanatorium was surrounded by a thick pine forest, visible through its large bright windows everywhere. It had a library and reading hall, and also a phonograph to please the souls of the patients. Everything was clean and tidy, and Anna Papadopoulou has drawn herself flowers to the walls, the windows and the doors, together with her motto: It’s never too late.

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

But, was that enough to ease the terrible pains of the disease? Or to ease the fear of dying? Was it enough to ease the misery of the marginalization that the tuberculosis patients felt everywhere in the society? Despite the fact that prominent and well respected members of the society suffered from tuberculosis, the general belief of the bourgeoisie was that the patients were members of the lower class, catching the disease through lack of hygiene or even ethics.

Tuberculosis marginalized the patients almost as the Hansen disease did to the lepers. The sanatoriums were considered by the less informed as places of isolation, similar to the Spinalonga island in Crete for the latter. Also, the general belief for them was of people who were dying, rather than people who were healing. This prejudice begun to change in the later years. In the Mana Sanatorium relatives and friends of the patients could visit them in a regular basis. Also, the patients could complete their high-school or university studies without leaving, and they also were forming a micro-society inside its walls, which was valuable for their psychology.

But, there were other ghosts too, that this heavenly place was maybe unable to despise. Was this serene and tranquil mountain able to oust the ghosts of war? The memories of a blood-filled trench in the Battle of the Sakarya River? The sounds of the bullets and the mortar flying over the Afyonkarahisar-Kütahya-Eskişehir line of fire? The final cries of the dead comrades drowned in mud? The broken promises of the politicians for the ‘Great Idea’ that Greeks could fight their way to Ankara, the corpses of friends that died for nothing, and the dead children and the drowned of burning Smyrna? No one will even know.

In close proximity to Mana Sanatorium, two more impressive stone Sanatoriums that operated during the time are still standing, as testimony to the beneficial air and environment of the region. Both were built with the help of the pneumologist Dr. Bobolas. One was the sanatorium of Vytina, known as the Ithomi or Agios Tryfonas sanatorium, which was built in 1928 and hosted patients mainly from the northwestern Peloponnese. The other one was the (incomplete) Sanatorium of Alonistaina, on the road connecting this village to the town of Vytina, known also as a hotel, on behalf of the high quality of its services.

Anna Papadopoulou would succumb to tuberculosis herself, in 1938. In the months following her death, and the invention of the tuberculosis cure, the three sanatoriums of central Arcadia would start under-operating. From 1941 to ‘44 they would get plundered by the German and Italian occupying forces of Greece during World War II. To this day they lay abandoned and desolate, remnants of the country’s past suffering, forgotten relics that were once hugging forgotten heroes.

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

The soldiers' ghost Sanatorium

Footnotes

Text & photography Copyright: Panos Diamantis 2013

FootNotes

Text & photography Copyright: Panos Diamantis 2013

© 2026 Desolation Road

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