In The Colossus of Maroussi, Henry Miller calls Hydra “aesthetically perfect,” as if it had been designed to inspire artists like him. Generations of poets, painters, and artists of all stripes seem to agree, having gone to the car‑free Greek island to create, and to get in the way of sponge fishers for whom aesthetics are beside the point. Sophia Loren and Maria Callas often frequented it, while Lawrence Durrell lived among the ruins. So did Leonard Cohen. In September 1960, having just turned twenty-six, he bought a house with no electricity for $1,500 (U.S). “All through the day,” he wrote to his mother, “you hear the calls of the street vendors and they are really rather musical.”
Hydra has survived, in the post-sponge era, on the muse economy: feeding and watering foreign artists. The heyday was the late 1950s and early ’60s, when Cohen was there and met Marianne Ihlen, whom he would make famous in song (“Bird on the Wire” and, of course, “So Long...
Tom Jokinen lives and writes in Winnipeg.
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