Mani

Join a classic adventurer on his travels throughout southern Greece, where he explores remote villages, swims in the Aegean and Ionian seas, and finds history wherever he goes. The Mani, at the tip of Greece’s—and Europe’s—southernmost promontory, is one of the most isolated regions of the world. Cut off from the rest of the country by the towering range of the Taygetus and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, it is a land where the past is still very much a part of its people’s daily lives. Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has been described as “a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Graham Greene,” bridges the genres of adventure story, travel writing, and memoir to reveal an ancient world living alongside the twentieth century. Here, in the book that confirmed his reputation as one of the English language’s finest writers of prose, Patrick Leigh Fermor carries the reader with him on his journeys among the Greeks of the mountains, exploring their history and time-honored lore. Mani is a companion volume to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s celebrated Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece.

New York Times Notable Book: A story of six generations of a Jewish family, by an author Saul Bellow called “one of Israel’s world-class writers.” In this novel, a winner of both the National Jewish Book Award and the first Israeli Literature Prize, A. B. Yehoshua weaves a deeply affecting family saga and an portrait of Jewish life over the past two centuries. The story moves backward through time, unfolding over the course of five conversations. On a kibbutz in the Negev in 1982, a student describes her strange meeting with her boyfriend’s father, Judge Gavriel Mani. On German-occupied Crete in 1944, a Nazi soldier recounts his attempts to hunt down the Mani family. In Jerusalem in 1918, a Jewish lawyer in the British army briefs his commanding officer on the forthcoming trial of the political agitator Yosef Mani. In a village in southern Poland in 1899, a young doctor reports back to his father on his travels, and on his sister’s romance with Dr. Moshe Mani. And in Athens in 1848, Avraham Mani reveals the heartbreaking tale of the death of his son, Yonef, in Jerusalem. Alfred Kazin hailed Mr. Mani as “one of the most remarkable pieces of fiction I have ever read.” Named as one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly, it is both an absorbing tale and a powerful statement about family, faith, and the weight of history. Translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin

For centuries Manicheism was a powerful religion, rivaled only by Christianity, but now virtually unheard of.Today, there is a resurgence of interest in Gnostic teachings. This work has been painstakingly pieced together and is an important work for scholars, religious researchers and those interested in alternative spiritual paths.

A six-generation family saga, extending from nineteenth-century Europe to British-occupied Palestine to German-occupied Crete and ultimately to modern Israel.

Some insight into Life in Mani Today The Road to freedom... Not since the advent of British writer Patrick Leigh Fermors book, Mani - Travels in the Southern Peloponnesus, more than fifty years ago, has there been an historic update, written in English, concerning this land and its people, from a new and very different perspective. Miami-born, Greek-American urologist, Dr. Mickey Demos, exposes the Mani from a unique angle in his book Life in Mani Today The Road to Freedom. This has been a project that the contributing editor, Panayiotis Kokkinias, has spent nearly two years preparing for publication. Kokkinias spent much of this past year in Mani working with Dr. Demos, who wanted to create an up-to-date version to the changes in history, which he discovered when he moved to Mani. His reasoning was based on the fact that his entire family origin began here centuries ago and, until he turned 69 years of age, he had never even visited Greece. Now, at 80, he was on a quest that encompassed an eleven year odyssey. Realizing the passion Kokkinias had for writing, based upon a number of book and periodicals that he had authored and which Demos had read, he asked Kokkinias to help him organize and complete his 600 pages of thoughts into a concise book format and get it published. Demos was a natural, Kokkinias said in an interview, relating to the Doctors ability to capture the stories he relates in Life in Mani Today. So many people of Greek descent have had their roots in Mani, and the stories abound reflecting the traits and characteristics of these wild mountain people who all claim to have a direct connection to a man named Petros Mavromichalis, one of the greatest freedom fighters in Hellenic history. So many myths, superstitions, battles, wild stories, songs, poems, hearsay, as well as vampires, bats, vendettas, and the power of the evil eye are just the beginning along with the warning to those who so much as mention the word, Mani, to anyone outside of this region. Everybody in Greece knew about Mani and had something to say about the place. You had better watch yourself. Those people in Mani are dangerous. Life in Mani Today will give new insight into what has transpired over these past 50-plus years. It is not a dry historical chronology, but a lively look, with some comic relief, about life in the old country. You might be surprised at what has changed and more surprised at what has stayed the same. Here is an opportunity to learn more about a part of Greece that has remained independent of the rest of the mainland for many years. How these people have survived and succeeded in life, and have stayed free from a lot of the politics that currently threaten the financial stability of this great country, continues as a credit to their hard work, their intelligence, and their use of common sense.

This study explores the artistic culture of religious instruction and the canonical art of the Manichaeans. Based on textual and artistic evidence, it identifies fragments form 10th-century editions of Mani’s Book of Pictures and its adaptations to other art objects.