An archive divided between institutions

The Manakia archive is not a single archive. Glass plates, paper prints, albums, film, purchase and donation records, family photographs, press reproductions and, more and more, digital files are held in different institutions and collections. A plate in Bitola and a print in Bucharest may show the same journey yet carry different information. Even a photograph whose original has vanished may survive in a publication, an album or a private house.

Beyond Yesterday worked directly with two institutions: the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest (MNȚR) and the State Archives of North Macedonia, Bitola Branch. It consulted the others through published catalogues, digitised holdings and photographs kept by families.

1. Photography: Bitola and Bucharest

The State Archives of North Macedonia, Bitola Department

Fonds 580, Braḱa Manaki – Bitola 1853–1964 (Браќа Манаки – Битола 1853–1964), held by the State Archives of North Macedonia, Bitola Branch, in Bitola, formerly Monastir. It contains glass-plate and flexible-film negatives, paper prints, documents, cameras and archival inventories.

This is the core fonds for the brothers’ work in Bitola and on their journeys across the Balkans. It also preserves the evidence with which many inherited captions and biographies can be checked. A photographic plate may show the photographer himself, the back of a studio, an illegible shop sign, a family among hundreds of unidentified faces or a mountain erroneously assigned to another town. Such details are not decorative. They are the clues from which historical questions emerge.

The figures differ by source. An official programme of the Albanian Ministry of Culture (2023), prepared for the exhibition at the Marubi Museum in collaboration with the Bitola archive, listed 6,702 glass negatives, 2,087 flat-film negatives, 1,071 roll-film items, 7,041 paper prints, 3,867 documents and 49 cameras or related objects (official programme, PDF). Other scholarly descriptions give different totals, for instance around 18,500 photographic negatives; the differences may come from classification or from how items are counted.

The recognition of the collection as cultural heritage of exceptional significance was studied by Ivana Hadjievska, who documents its formal classification and legal protection. Relevant technical and historical studies appear in Makedonski Arhivist 31–32 (2022): Dimitar Gjorgievski on Camera 300, Goce Stojanovski, Marija Durlova and Gjorgievski on digitization, and Hadjievska on Fonds 580. Open journal PDF.

The fonds is also the core of project EAP1470 of the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme (see section 4). More on the fonds and its digital catalogue: State Archives website.

What Beyond Yesterday looked for here. The 2026 research at Bitola followed the historical plates and their physical properties: the broken negative from London linked to Camera 300, the photographs of military groups and Colmar von der Goltz’s 1909 visit, and other plates that allow a place, a date or an identification to be corrected. This research is told, with images and with the reasoning in view, in the Journal. Publishing it does not mean the project holds the negatives.

The National Museum of the Romanian Peasant, Bucharest (MNȚR)

The museum’s Ethnological Image Archive holds the Manakia photographic collection: historical ethnographic photographs, albums and documentation of Aromanian communities, including materials associated with Ianaki and Milton Manakia.

The Bucharest holdings illuminate a different side of the brothers’ career: the Pindus villages, costume, pastoral life, families, markets, ritual, schools, travel and daily gestures. They are crucial for reading Manakia photography as a work of ethnographic observation, not merely as the prehistory of cinema. The historical acquisition of a substantial group of images by Alexandru Tzigara-Samurcaș in 1906 is discussed in the literature, notably by Marian Țuțui.

The museum’s online ethnological archive has a dedicated Manakia collection page. At the time of this compilation, three photographs appear publicly on that collection page. This is a digitized sample, not a numerical inventory of the complete museum holdings. A representative object record provides subject description and catalogue information.

The most important scholarly guide is Ioana Popescu’s Privește! Frații Manakia (original 2001; revised second edition 2013), which places the photographs in a dialogue between ethnography, museum history and the Aromanian world. The full revised edition can be consulted online.

What Beyond Yesterday looked for here. The MNȚR photographs are among the original images against which the new photographs, made in the field, are compared.

2. Film

Cinematheque of North Macedonia, Skopje

The North Macedonian Cinematheque keeps the surviving film material of the brothers. It conserves and interprets the film elements, and its holdings are not to be confused with the photographic fonds in Bitola. Its DVD edition, The Brothers Milton and Janaki Manaki, presents 42 film records running about 70 minutes, after conservation and restoration work.

The original camera negative, the preservation copy, the restored digital master, the projection copy and the edited compilation with modern titles may contain almost the same images, yet they do not have the same historical status. A film with a single title in one archive may be divided into several segments in another; conversely, several fragments may be assembled into a twentieth-century film edition.

The Cinematheque keeps a historical chronology that conventionally dates the first Camera 300 film to 1905. Beyond Yesterday proposes an alternative, argued dating of 1907. The arguments are set out in Methods and Debates.

Romanian National Film Archive, Bucharest

The National Film Archive (Cinemateca Română) in Bucharest is the place to follow the Romanian-edited versions of the Manakia moving images. Marian Țuțui compares the surviving material and discusses two edited titles, Scene din viața aromânilor din Pind [Scenes from Aromanian life in the Pindus] and Excursie în Macedonia turcească [Excursion to Turkish Macedonia]. Their Romanian intertitles and the grouping of episodes keep information that is lost when the sequences are split into separate catalogue entries.

The 1911 Romanian delegation matters especially: material catalogued elsewhere as separate visits to Bitola, Gopesh and Resen may belong to the same journey and the same compilation. How each surviving edition relates to any original footage is settled by comparing frames, editing, intertitles and lengths. See Marian Țuțui’s comparative paper and the 1981 documentary catalogue by Silvia Borcan and Bujor T. Rîpeanu.

Yugoslav Film Archive / Jugoslovenska kinoteka, Belgrade

The Jugoslovenska kinoteka (Belgrade) belongs to the longer history of how the films were kept. In the 1950s, Milton negotiated and transferred material with Yugoslav film institutions and Macedonian archives. The literature mentions preservation or safety copies of some films linked to the Yugoslav Film Archive, and the documentary Kamera broj 300 (1958), with Milton’s filmed testimony. Exact holdings should be checked against the current Belgrade catalogue: custody in the past does not prove present ownership of every element.

See the Jugoslovenska kinoteka and Igor Stardelov’s publication on film preservation.

3. Albums, personal papers and family collections

Library of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest

The Library of the Romanian Academy holds albums and historical photographic reproductions linked to the Manakia brothers. Marian Țuțui discusses early album material and copies deposited or donated by Ianaki. A photograph mounted in an album is not the same object as a glass plate kept separately.

National Archives of Romania, and the Societatea de Cultură Macedo-Română papers

Correspondence, teaching appointments, pensions, purchases and the circulation of albums survive in institutional documents, not only in visual collections. The papers of the Societatea de Cultură Macedo-Română are especially important. Emil Țîrcomnicu’s publications of 2019, 2020 and 2024 are the most practical way into them. The project has not consulted the whole fonds directly; it cites what these editions publish.

Family photographs and private holders in Greece

Private prints, postcards, negatives, albums and letters are scattered among descendants, former sitters and the inhabitants of villages photographed around 1900. In Laista, Zagori, recognising houses in a village panorama helped date an image to 1898, and comparing private prints with a broken Bitola glass negative linked different versions of the same gathering. The case is told in the Journal: “The same minute, in three countries”.

The Museum of the Macedonian Struggle in Thessaloniki has worked with photographs from the Leonidas Manakis family archive, donated to it by Ambassador Alexandros Mallias. Its exhibition Giannis and Miltos Manakia: The Faces Behind the Lens and the Greek-English volume that accompanies it are another line of preservation and interpretation (museum’s account). This family collection is separate from the Bitola Fonds 580.

Albania: the Marubi museum, exhibition partner

The National Museum of Photography “Marubi” in Shkodër hosted the 2023 exhibition Janaki & Milton Manaki, curated by Luçjan Bedeni with the Bitola Department of the State Archives of North Macedonia. It showed mobility, rituals and the daily life of the peoples of the Balkans (programme of the Albanian Ministry of Culture). The originals remain in Bitola.

Bulgaria: images outside the central archive

Ianaki’s years in Plovdiv during the First World War produced studio portraits, some of which survive outside the main archive. Research and enquiries in Plovdiv identified individual sitters, photographers’ signatures and studio locations, among them a portrait of the court barber Konstantin Giorgiev Iakumidis. A panorama once classified as Plovdiv was relocated to Sliven by comparing the mountain skyline and surviving buildings. Such cases show the difference between where an image is kept and where it was made (see the Journal). Museums, local archives and private holders in Bulgaria remain to be explored; no central Bulgarian Manakia collection is claimed here.

Historic newspapers and printed reproductions

Early newspaper images can serve as dated witnesses even when the negative is missing. Universul, for example, published in March 1903 a photograph explicitly attributed to I. Manakia. Ottoman papers such as Rumeli (2 July 1911) and Yeni İkdam (9 July 1911) give clues about films, routes and screenings of the time. The original press texts are the ones to read, not cropped digital reproductions.

4. British Library, EAP1470

Time stands still: preserving the Manaki brothers’ photographic legacy is the title of project EAP1470, funded by the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme and carried out with the institution that holds the collection (DOI: 10.15130/EAP1470). Its online catalogue gives access to the digitised items, their descriptions and the structure of the collection.

Digitisation by a programme the British Library supports does not mean that the Library has acquired the physical original, or that every scan may be reused freely. The holding institution is named together with the digitisation platform when they differ.

See also the EAP blog on archival preservation.

5. Three cases from the Journal

The camera and its journey, 1907. A broken glass negative shows Ianaki outside London’s Criterion Theatre. The theatre’s programme gives an independent date: The Liars ran there from April to October 1907. The location of Charles Urban’s firm adds the technical and geographical context. The image fixes an interval for Ianaki’s presence in London; that the camera was bought then, and that the first film dates from that year, is the project’s argument, not something written on the negative. Read the case.

The wrong officer and the right one, 1909. Glass plates long thought to show Mustafa Kemal among military-school pupils were re-examined by comparing faces and uniforms. Other plates of a 1909 delegation linked to Colmar von der Goltz supported a later identification of Kemal. The method combined inspection of the negatives, period history, repeated appearances, forensic assessment and a record of what remains uncertain. The archive’s old labels stay recoverable even where they are challenged. Read the case.

A festival at Laista. Related photographs survive in different forms and in different places: a private print, a fragment of an archival negative and another print. Only by comparing them does the sequence appear and the photographer’s multiple exposures become distinguishable. The history of the object becomes part of the history of the scene. Read the case.

6. Photographs on the art market

Part of the photographic legacy also survives outside institutions. Studio portraits, cabinet photographs, photographic postcards and prints occasionally appear in commercial catalogues. Such listings show circulation and possible private ownership; without examining the physical object they prove neither authorship nor an unbroken chain of custody.

A photographic postcard. A. Karamitsos International Auctions catalogued lot 08892 as a Manakia photographic postcard of Monastir–Bitola, c. 1916, 14 × 9 cm, with an embossed “FOTO MANAKIA / MONASTIR” stamp. The catalogue gives a starting price of €50 and a realised price of €65. It is a dated example of the trade in attributed prints and of a studio mark; it does not identify the sitter, the first buyer or any earlier owner (auction record).

Resneli Niyazi Bey and photographs attributed to Manakia. The catalogue of the 58th Istanbul Müzayede online auction describes photographs from the Resneli Niyazi family collection. Lot 71, a large print of 35 × 30 cm, shows Niyazi Bey with pupils of the Resne İnkılab School and attributes the image to a Manakia photographer of Manastır. Other lots show the same sitter, but some were made by Photo Phebus in Istanbul. A famous sitter and a coherent family collection therefore do not imply a single photographer: the stamp, the mount inscription and the object itself decide each case (auction catalogue).

7. Image credits

Archival images on this site are credited to their custodians, and each historical photograph is kept apart from the new photograph made in the field by Cătălin D. Constantin. Sources that gave only context are credited as sources, not as holders of specific originals.