Creatives have been flocking to the ancient idyll of Hydra for decades, writes
Alison Stewart.
The late great Canadian poet and singer, Leonard Cohen’s Bird on a Wire perfectly captured the freedom-seeking zeitgeist of the 1960s.
It wasn’t written in Haight Ashbury or Kathmandu or even Goa, but on Hydra.
Like its nine-headed namesake of Greek mythology, this tiny Aegean isle, first inhabited around 3000BC, is multi-faceted, enjoying an outsized reputation.
Historically, its brilliant seafarers helped Greece defeat the Ottomans and pioneer Hellenic independence, but Hydra has also been a powerful muse to many artists and writers since the early 1900s.
Floating between the Saronic and Argolic gulfs, an hour from Piraeus, Hydra’s magnetic beauty has drawn talent aplenty to its steep and rocky shores. We have sailed into its glittering bay aboard Ponant’s small ship, Le Lyrial, on the last leg of our voyage from Venice to Athens.
Rising before us is a serene, intensely lit landscape of an Aegean island that Jacqueline Kennedy called ‘‘the stuff of fairy tales… I want to have a home here someday, to return and bring my children.’’
Hydra lacks the frenzied chaos of some of the other Greek islands. It can’t just be the fact that vehicles are forbidden in the main town and only donkeys or people on foot are allowed to climb the steep stone stairways.
The donkeys still line up on the harbour front as they did on my last visit in the 1970s. The cats still meander unhindered. Bougainvillea and geraniums still tumble from balconies.
Vertiginous, shaded steps still rise to the heavens and the peace is as palpable. Is this particular quality of light and stillness what Cohen sought when he bought a house high on the hill at just 26?
‘‘If you own a house on Hydra, the cities seem less scary,’’ he said.
In fact, Cohen arrived after the Australian literary couple, George Johnston and Charmian Clift, who were 1960s trailblazers. The fascination with Hydra arose perhaps from great Greek painter Nikos Gikas’ beautiful paintings of his ancestral island.
Similarly, in the 1930s, the Aegean light, and the stone and geometry of the architecture inspired modernist painters Marc Chagall and Picasso.
Nobel Prize-winning Greek writer George Seferis lived on and wrote about Hydra, while international writers such as Lawrence Durrell flocked there, dizzy with creativity.
Henry Miller wrote of ‘‘simple pleasures on an aesthetically perfect island’’, in his 1939 travelogue about Greece, The Colossus of Maroussi.
Inspired perhaps by those who came before, and by iconic Hydra films such as Sophia Loren’s The Boy on a Dolphin and critically acclaimed The Girl in Black, a new wave of ‘‘searchers’’ arrived. Writer Alan Ginsberg, actor Peter Finch, artist Sidney Nolan, painter Anthony Kingsmill all gravitated to this place of inspiration, peace, and kerosene lamps
‘‘If you own a house on Hydra, the cities seem less scary.’’ Leonard Cohen