Manopoulos: Handcrafted in Greece Since 1970

Some companies begin with a business plan. Manopoulos began with a table, a board and a few tired men. In 1968 Costas Manopoulos watched his father, George, come home after long working days and sit down to play backgammon with his friends. The dice rattled, the checkers clicked across the points, and by the end of the evening the weight of the day seemed to have lifted. The boy noticed. The idea that a game can take the stress of the day away and bring people together has stayed at the centre of the house ever since.

A backgammon board after work

In Greece, backgammon is not a pastime reserved for clubs or collectors. It is tavli, and it is played everywhere: on café terraces, on balconies, on ferry decks, in the back rooms of shops once the shutters are down. A board is often older than the people playing on it. It is lent, repaired, handed down. What Costas saw at his father’s table was ordinary, and that was the point. A good game is a small ritual that makes an ordinary evening better.

That observation would take years to turn into a company. First it had to pass through an art school.

Bronze pieces and a small shop in Athens

At 21, while studying at art university, Costas made his first chess figures. He made them in bronze, for a young-talents exhibition at the University of Athens. It was the work of a student, but it was noticed. The response was encouraging enough that he opened a small shop in central Athens and began selling a limited quantity of handcrafted chess and backgammon sets.

The brand line that Manopoulos still uses today dates from this period: Handcrafted in Greece since 1970. It is a short sentence, and it says three things at once. The sets are made by hand. They are made in Greece. And the people making them have been doing so for a long time.

The shop found a particular kind of customer. Owners of gift shops came in, saw the sets, and wanted more of them than one young man could make at a bench. Demand of that kind has a way of making decisions for you. Costas set up his own workshop.

From a Greek workshop to the world

For roughly a decade Manopoulos grew within the Greek gift and toy market. The sets were sold in shops across the country, and the workshop learned what it takes to make the same object well, many times over, without losing the character that made it worth buying in the first place.

Then Costas looked further. He took the company abroad through the Spielwarenmesse, the international toy fair in Nuremberg, one of the great meeting places of the trade. It worked. Since 1985 Manopoulos has exhibited internationally every year, at Maison et Objet in Paris, at the Nuremberg Toy Fair and at Ambiente in Frankfurt. Today the house serves customers in more than 25 countries.

That is a long way from a father’s backgammon evenings. It is also, in a sense, the same thing repeated at scale: a board on a table, and people gathered around it.

Thebes, and the machine beside the hand

In 2000 Manopoulos completed a long programme of technological modernisation with a new factory in Thebes, in the region of Viotia, known in English as Boeotia, northwest of Athens. The new building did not replace the old methods. It sat beside them. Traditional hand techniques are kept alongside modern production, and each is used where it does its best work.

Machines are good at precision and repetition: cutting a board to size, making sure the two halves of a case meet cleanly. Hands are better at judgement: choosing which piece of veneer goes where, checking the finish, feeling whether a hinge closes as it should. A Manopoulos board passes through both.

Today Manopoulos S.A. describes itself as an integrated manufacturer of historical metal chess sets and traditional handmade backgammon, exporting worldwide. Around those two pillars sit dominoes, playing cards, poker sets, mahjong, trays and boxes, all made with the same materials and the same attention.

Wood that shows where it came from

Walk through the Manopoulos range and you will meet a short list of woods again and again: olive wood and olive burl, mahogany, walnut, rosewood, ebony, oak and wenge, often set off with mother of pearl. The backgammon boards draw on marquetry, an art that flourished in Europe in the sixteenth century, in which pieces of different woods are fitted together to make a pattern.

Natural wood cannot be free of imperfections. The grain will be uneven. Two boards of the same model will differ in shade. Manopoulos does not treat this as a flaw to be hidden. It treats it as part of the wood’s character and as proof that the material is real. A board that looked exactly like every other board would be telling you something about how it was made.

The limited-edition backgammon shown with this story makes the point clearly. It is built on a 48 × 30 cm case with side racks for the checkers, and its playing field brings together wenge, mahogany and walnut with mother-of-pearl elements. It is inlaid veneer work, finished by hand in Thebes and produced in small numbers. Look closely and no two areas of the board read quite the same.

Manopoulos in Canada

El Laguito Cigars carries the Manopoulos range and supplies it in Canada from Mississauga, Ontario, with delivery anywhere in the country. The selection covers the backgammon boards in walnut, wenge, oak-walnut and mahogany; the suede roll-up sets made for travel; the limited editions in burl and tree trunk; wooden, modern, Bauhaus and cast-metal chess; and the game-night sets for poker, cards, dominoes and mahjong.

Every piece carries the Manopoulos mark. Manopoulos is a trademark of Manopoulos S.A., Greece.

This is the first of twelve stories about the house. Over the coming months the Manopoulos Journal will look at marquetry and the metal chess sets, at how to choose and care for a board, at how Greece plays tavli, and at the games that fill an autumn evening. Each story comes back, in the end, to the scene that started it all: a table after a long day, a board between friends, and the sound of dice.