One More Island – Hydra in Greece

After Kea (a remarkably unspoilt Greek Island) and Jamaica I made a short visit to another Greek island – Hydra. Now Hydra has been on my ‘must do’ list for far too long and I’d really like to go back. It’s not as far off the beaten tourist track as Kea, but it’s certainly not Mykonos or Santorini, I never had a feeling that Hydra was overtouristed.

◄ Perhaps some of that comes down to Hydra’s lack of beaches. That’s looked upon as a bit of an advantage, Hydra doesn’t attract the beach tourist masses. Although the water is just fine and there are plenty of places to get into it, my co-visitor Nick Varian and I started each morning with a pre-breakfast swim.

▲ The town of Hydra is postcard perfect, houses (blue and white of course) tumbling down the hillside to an equally postcard-perfect harbour.

▲ We got there on the Flying Cat 4 high speed catamaran out of Piraeus, a one hour trip. Going back it took a bit longer as we stopped in Poros on the way.

▲ As soon as you disembark on Hydra you notice the island’s really big advantage – no traffic. If you can’t tote your own bags to wherever you’re staying you’ll have to negotiate baggage transport with one of the island’s donkey specialists. Not only are there no cars or buses, there are also no motorcycles or scooters, not even bicycles are allowed. Presumably they must have extended the wheeled transport ban to electric scooters when they were invented. There are a few vehicles – garbage trucks to clean up the town every morning and the Hydra fire department has transport. Perhaps the lack of wheeled transport also contributes to Hydra low-crime reputation, you can’t have mobile phone snatchers on motorcycles if there aren’t any motorcycles.

▲ small children also indulge in donkey tours and presumably tourists could arrange to tour Hydra by donkey. Leonard Cohen certainly did during his time on the island

▲ The Leonard Cohen Memorial Bench – I Came So Far for Beauty – a short stroll along the coastal path from the town of Hydra towards the small harbour at Kamini

▲ Of course I sought out the house where Leonard Cohen lived during his spell on Hydra. It’s not open to the public and there’s no indication that this is the house. Hydra could do with a few London-style ‘blue plaques’ identifying who lived where. Check my blog from 10 years ago on Marianne, typewriters and that notable house. In fact the house is owned by Leonard Cohen’s son Adam, who is said to be a regular visitor.

◄ Want confirmation that you’ve found the right house? Look for the Star of David under the door knocker.

◄ Paul Genoni & Tanya Dalziell’s Half the Perfect World – subtitled Writers, Dreamers & Drifters on Hydra, 1955-1964

The cover features Charmian Clift, George Johnston, Marianne Ihlen and Leonard Cohen. Clift and Johnston’s ‘Australian House’ was the gathering place for Hydra’s expat art colony, Leonard Cohen certainly stayed there when he first arrived on Hydra, until he bought his own house. Cohen reported that the Australians ‘drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more, they blessed more, and they helped a great deal more. They were an inspiration.’

When they finally left Hydra it was for George Johnston to publish his classic Australian novel My Brother Jack and Charmian Clift to become a star columnist at the Sydney Morning Herald, tracking the huge changes Australia was going through at the time. But it was only half a perfect world, a Guardian article ‘Bohemian tragedy: Leonard Cohen and the curse of Hydra’ recounts how life went so wrong for the Australian couple. Charmian Clift committed suicide in 1969 aged 45 and a year later George Johnston was dead too: tuberculosis and alcohol. Nor did the tragedies stop there. Their daughter Shane committed suicide aged 25 and their eldest son Martin was a successful poet, but he was dead at 42, having followed his father into alcoholism. Only the youngest son Jason escaped.

When Cohen performed in Sydney in 1980 he dedicated the show ‘to George Johnston and Charmian Clift who taught me how to write,”

▲ The Johnston-Clift house, which when I found it turned out to be only a stone’s throw from the place I was staying – Rania’s House.

▲ Dinner in the Douskos Tavern (or Xeri Elia) during my Hydra stay, it’s a only a few steps from the Johnston-Clift house. This was the popular gathering place for the Hydra arts crowd in the 1960s and it’s equally popular today and looks scarcely changed. By the harbour their favourite was Katsikas, today it’s the Roloi Cafe.

▲ Leonard Cohen and Charmian Clift in the Douskos Tavern (photograph by James Burke) in October 1960. James Burke was sent to Hydra by Life Magazine to photograph for an article about the island and its artistic circle. The article was never published and the 1600 photographs Burke took were shoved in a Life Magazine filing cabinet and forgotten for decades. Of course Leonard Cohen was virtually unknown at the time, just a struggling poet and writer whose fame scarcely stretched beyond Montreal. Click here for more of Burke’s Hydra photos, many of which appear in Half the Perfect World.

James Burke and George Johnston had met in China during WW II when they were both war correspondents and made a daring trip into Tibet together in 1945. In subsequent years Burke was a frequent visitor to the Himalaya – he was in Kathmandu when Edmund Hillary and Norgay Tensing returned to the Nepalese capital after making the first successful ascent of Everest in 1953. Then in 1964, aged 49, Burke died in a Himalayan fall in Assam in India.

So Long, Marianne is an eight-part Norwegian-Canadian TV miniseries about the Cohen-Marianne relationship which also bring in many other of the Hydra crowd. Worth watching before a Hydra visit

▲ Harbour from Lazaros Koundouriotis Mansion

Koundouriotis was a major hero of the Greek independence struggle and his mansion houses a fine museum collection and offers wonderful views over the harbour. It’s easy to recognize portraits or statues of Lazaros Koundouriotis because he lost an eye and always wore an eyepatch. Right beside the mansion the Ekklisia Ipapanti church dates from 1780 and features a very decorative tower. A short walk will take you to the house of the artist Panagiotis Tetsis and a few more steps will take you to the Leonard Cohen house, he had quite a climb up from the waterfront.

▲ The mansion featured a display of Greek travel posters over the years, the ones from the 1940s were the best!

▲ Jeff Koons Appollo Wind Spinner is a Deste Foundation creation just east of the harbour, although it wasn’t spinning when I paid a visit. Other Hydra attractions include the extensive collection of the waterfront Historical Archives Museum of Hydra. The Kimisis Tis Theotokou Cathedral with its marble bell tower and Ecclesiasticla Museum is also on the harborside.

▲ Prophet Elias Monastery (Moni Profiti Ilia) – the climb up to the monastery offers superb views down on Hydra Town and its harbour but it’s a ‘long haul’ according to the Lonely Planet Greek Islands book and will take ‘a solid hour or more.’ More! The final zigzag ascent to the top seems to take forever, but there’s plenty to see when you get there. Walking signs just outside the monastery proclaim that it’s only a km distance and another hundred metres or so climb to Mt Eros, at 588metres the highest point on the island. Nick and I decided that the climb to the monastery was quite far enough for our aged legs. I really appreciated the wonderfully chilled drinking fountain at the entrance to the monastery.

I’m a happy traveller, I like everywhere I go, but I really wish my Hydra trip had been longer. I’d have loved a few more days and I would have taken one of the boats that run from Hydra Town to beaches or villages around the island and then I would have walked back. Bring plenty of water walkers are warned, once you get away from the settlements there are no facilities.