STORY: JULIAN TOMPKIN
Hydra harbour appears like an epiphany.
As the ferry arcs around the barren headland, the town abruptly emerges like a dreamy postcard of yesteryear: a serene harbour of gently swaying skiffs set to a backdrop of stacked whitewashed facades cut dramatically into the mountainside.
A comparatively small rock in the Saronic island chain just 70km south of Athens, Hydra has long been the playground for the Athenian upper classes: a quixotic idyll from where to escape the cacophonous melee of that ancient city of nearly 4 million souls. But the island — home to just 2000 permanent residents — has managed to deftly evade the tourism onslaught that has plagued its more famous neighbours, namely Mykonos and Santorini.
STORY: JULIAN TOMPKIN
Hydra harbour appears like an epiphany.
As the ferry arcs around the barren headland, the town abruptly emerges like a dreamy postcard of yesteryear: a serene harbour of gently swaying skiffs set to a backdrop of stacked whitewashed facades cut dramatically into the mountainside.
A comparatively small rock in the Saronic island chain just 70km south of Athens, Hydra has long been the playground for the Athenian upper classes: a quixotic idyll from where to escape the cacophonous melee of that ancient city of nearly 4 million souls. But the island — home to just 2000 permanent residents — has managed to deftly evade the tourism onslaught that has plagued its more famous neighbours, namely Mykonos and Santorini.
This lack of braggadocio is no accident: the island’s residents have fiercely guarded their sanctuary despite all financial temptations. Here you will find no hotel chains, no beach clubs, no fast-food outlets. But the most glaring absence is that of motorised vehicles, wholly outlawed — an anomaly in a country where the biting drone of mopeds is ubiquitous. The closest thing to an Uber on Hydra is a genial mule, the island’s primary mode of transport.
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As one long-time Australian resident tells me: “I am afraid the cliche is real: time stops still in Hydra. I came here for one day and ended up staying 50 years.” |
Indeed, with its draconian heritage laws, Hydra remains embalmed in a sort of chimerical pastel hue, like a period film set – a fitting analogy, for locals commonly refer to the harbourfront agora as “the stage”, where the island’s colourful life plays out amid its cafe tables and artisan shopfronts peddling everything from monastery honey to traditional wooden board games and Greek designer wear.
This lack of braggadocio is no accident: the island’s residents have fiercely guarded their sanctuary despite all financial temptations. Here you will find no hotel chains, no beach clubs, no fast-food outlets. But the most glaring absence is that of motorised vehicles, wholly outlawed — an anomaly in a country where the biting drone of mopeds is ubiquitous. The closest thing to an Uber on Hydra is a genial mule, the island’s primary mode of transport.
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As one long-time Australian resident tells me: “I am afraid the cliche is real: time stops still in Hydra. I came here for one day and ended up staying 50 years.” |
Indeed, with its draconian heritage laws, Hydra remains embalmed in a sort of chimerical pastel hue, like a period film set – a fitting analogy, for locals commonly refer to the harbourfront agora as “the stage”, where the island’s colourful life plays out amid its cafe tables and artisan shopfronts peddling everything from monastery honey to traditional wooden board games and Greek designer wear.
Hydra’s “stage” has lured many a cinematic star, perhaps none more memorable than Sophia Loren, who made her English-language debut here in 1957’s Boy On A Dolphin.
She was later quoted as saying Hydra is “one of the most beautiful places in the world. I remember it with great, great joy. I will never forget Hydra.”
More recently the island became the set for the television series So Long, Marianne, charting the lives of the island’s most notorious real-life lovers, the Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen and his Norwegian muse Marianne Ihlen, played by Alex Wolff and Thea Sofie Loch Naess respectively.
The series also starred Australia’s own Noah Taylor and Anna Torv, who portrayed late married antipodean authors George Johnston and Charmian Clift, who made landfall in Hydra in 1955 and would go on to spend the next decade at the very kernel of the island’s small but influential international artistic community.
Hydra’s “stage” has lured many a cinematic star, perhaps none more memorable than Sophia Loren, who made her English-language debut here in 1957’s Boy On A Dolphin.
She was later quoted as saying Hydra is “one of the most beautiful places in the world. I remember it with great, great joy. I will never forget Hydra.”
More recently the island became the set for the television series So Long, Marianne, charting the lives of the island’s most notorious real-life lovers, the Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen and his Norwegian muse Marianne Ihlen, played by Alex Wolff and Thea Sofie Loch Naess respectively.
The series also starred Australia’s own Noah Taylor and Anna Torv, who portrayed late married antipodean authors George Johnston and Charmian Clift, who made landfall in Hydra in 1955 and would go on to spend the next decade at the very kernel of the island’s small but influential international artistic community.
Hydra has long lured artists, writers and thinkers, compelled by its quietude, lack of superficial distractions and what American man of letters Henry Miller described as its “wild and naked perfection”.
One of those seekers would be a flip-flop-wearing 20-something Australian writer named Tim Winton, who washed up there in 1988 on an overnighter and stayed on for six months. It was amid the fragrant cypress and prismatic oleander that Winton would complete the manuscript for his most celebrated novel, Cloudstreet, and set part of its follow-up, The Riders. The fabled Australian painter Sidney Nolan, too, would find creative succour in Hydra among the island’s whitewashed manors and serpentine cobbled lanes, which he would immortalise in paint.
Today Hydra remains a sanctum for the inspired soul, and on any given day you are likely to pull up a stool at the island’s oldest and most storied watering hole, The Pirate Bar, alongside mega-artist Jeff Koons or David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, both who frequent the island (Gilmour’s wife, the writer Polly Samson, set her latest novel, A Theatre For Dreamers — a fictionalised portrait of the aforementioned Clift — on the island).
Contemporary travellers are drawn to Hydra as much for its extraordinary cultural pedigree as its aesthetic splendour and sense of dislocation from the maddening world. Just 90 minutes by ferry from Athens, it often feels like a parallel world of unfettered tranquillity, where days are best wiled away by the sea or in one of its many traditional tavernas, none more compelling than Xeri Elia Douskos Taverna, set back a short walk from the port beneath a canopy of ancient olive trees.
Today Hydra remains a sanctum for the inspired soul, and on any given day you are likely to pull up a stool at the island’s oldest and most storied watering hole, The Pirate Bar, alongside mega-artist Jeff Koons or David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, both who frequent the island (Gilmour’s wife, the writer Polly Samson, set her latest novel, A Theatre For Dreamers — a fictionalised portrait of the aforementioned Clift — on the island).
Contemporary travellers are drawn to Hydra as much for its extraordinary cultural pedigree as its aesthetic splendour and sense of dislocation from the maddening world. Just 90 minutes by ferry from Athens, it often feels like a parallel world of unfettered tranquillity, where days are best wiled away by the sea or in one of its many traditional tavernas, none more compelling than Xeri Elia Douskos Taverna, set back a short walk from the port beneath a canopy of ancient olive trees.
With the absence of transport — even bicycles are outlawed — this is an island that demands to be explored in the time-honoured way, on foot, with its clifftop trails connecting the smaller settlements of Kamini and Vlychos. The latter boasts the island’s most picturesque eatery, Taverna Marina, where just-caught fish and skewers of mountain lamb are bathed in lemon and wild thyme and seared over coals.
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For the more intrepid, the walking trail through dense pine forest to the Prophet Elias Monastery atop Mount Eros offers panoramic views of the island and staggering vistas across the Saronic Gulf to the Peloponnese beyond. |
With the absence of transport — even bicycles are outlawed — this is an island that demands to be explored in the time-honoured way, on foot, with its clifftop trails connecting the smaller settlements of Kamini and Vlychos. The latter boasts the island’s most picturesque eatery, Taverna Marina, where just-caught fish and skewers of mountain lamb are bathed in lemon and wild thyme and seared over coals.
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For the more intrepid, the walking trail through dense pine forest to the Prophet Elias Monastery atop Mount Eros offers panoramic views of the island and staggering vistas across the Saronic Gulf to the Peloponnese beyond. |
Come evening, the entire town descends to the agora to feast, stroll and linger, soundtracked by a sublime symphony of cicadas occasionally interrupted by the pitter-patter of wooden skiffs in the harbour and the contemplative chime of vesper bells.
I turn to a random page of Clift’s 1957 memoir Peel Me A Lotus, her paean to the primal call of Hydra: “a salt-stiff bathing suit strung on a line, a straw hat hanging on a nail, sweet red cherries heaped in a wooden bowl, a clock ticking, a kicked-off sandal, salad vegetables crisping in an enamel pail, a sprig of mint crushed between the fingers — one enters again, with an aching sense of wonder, the bright, lost world of one’s own childhood.”