Hydra

Hydra has no cars, no scooters and no motor vehicles of any kind. Mules carry luggage from the ferry up to the hotels, and the donkey drivers waiting on the quay each midday are how the island moves it. Water taxis also run to the more distant villages and swimming spots. Pack a soft bag rather than a hard suitcase, and tip the driver who carries yours.

The grey stone mansions around the harbour were built in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Hydriot shipping captains. They grew wealthy on Mediterranean trade and on running the British blockade during the Napoleonic Wars. When the Greek War of Independence broke out in 1821, the same families turned their fleet to the cause. Hydra effectively paid for and crewed a large part of the revolutionary navy, under the admiral Andreas Miaoulis. The Historical Archives Museum on the harbour holds the logbooks.

In 1960 Leonard Cohen bought a small white house up in the lanes for US$1,500. Marianne Ihlen lived there with him for much of the decade, and he wrote several of his early albums and the novel Beautiful Losers here. The Athens School of Fine Arts has a campus on the harbour. Each summer the DESTE Foundation holds exhibitions in a former municipal slaughterhouse on the headland. None of this is staged for visitors.

The walking is excellent. The path up to the Profitis Ilias monastery, above the town, takes about an hour each way and gives the clearest view of the harbour on the island. Swimming is from flat rocks rather than beaches: Spilia and Kamini in the town, or Bisti or Vlychos by water taxi for the day. Hydra needs three nights to be seen properly. A weekend day trip from Athens does not show you the island.

House Notes

  1. Arrival

    The helicopter from Athens takes around half an hour, and iFly Air Charters operate the transfer. Hydra has no airfield. The helipad is on Kivotos, an uninhabited islet north-west of Molos, and a water taxi covers the last stretch into the harbour. The alternative is the Hellenic Seaways Flying Dolphin from Piraeus, two hours via Poros.

  2. The address

    Bratsera occupies a stone building of 1860 that was a working sponge factory, founded by the Hydriot Nickolaos Verveniotis. The name comes from the bratsera, the place where Hydra’s sponge fleets once set out. The restored building holds 25 rooms around a pool, with reclaimed materials and beech wood in the suites. One suite carries hand-painted friezes dating from 1756.

  3. The mansion

    The Lazaros Koundouriotis Historical Mansion, on the west side of the harbour, has been a museum since 2001, as an annex of the National Historical Museum. The ground floor keeps the family heirlooms as the last descendant, Pandelis Koundouriotis, lived among them. In the old cellars, a small gallery hangs work by Periklis Vyzantios and his son Konstantinos Vyzantios.

  4. Tetsis at home

    Panagiotis Tetsis, the Hydriot painter and Academy of Athens member who died in 2016, gave his grandparents’ house to the Historical and Ethnological Society in 2007. One aisle of the ground floor was the family’s candle workshop and grocery-tavern. Visits are arranged through the Koundouriotis Mansion, from 10am to 4pm daily, 25 March to 31 October.

  5. The slaughterhouse

    The DESTE Foundation Project Space occupies the island’s old slaughterhouse on the headland, which the municipality granted to the foundation in 2008. The collector Dakis Joannou set up DESTE in 1983. Here its standing practice is to give the bare stone building to a single artist each year, Jeff Koons, Maurizio Cattelan and Kiki Smith among them, for work made for the room itself. The space opens in the warmer months.

  6. The cathedral

    The Cathedral of the Dormition stands in the middle of the harbour, beneath the clock tower. It is a domed basilica raised in the mid-17th century and rebuilt by Venetian architects after an earthquake, with two marble bell towers and a marble iconostasis (the carved screen before the altar) inside. It ceased to be a monastery in 1833, and its cloisters now hold the town hall. The small Ecclesiastical and Byzantine Museum within keeps vestments and 18th-century icons, the Unwithered Rose of 1774 among them.

  7. Omilos

    Omilos sits just outside the harbour mouth on the way to the Spilia rocks. It is a low house built over the sea, on the site of the old fuel depot that became the Lagoudera nightclub. Kostas Acheilas and Lisa Bartsioka took on the abandoned shell in 2006, and the kitchen under Aristotelis Anastasakis is modern Greek and Mediterranean. The terrace is the smarter table on the island: whitewashed and minimal, with the water under the railing.

  8. Limnioniza

    Limnioniza, on Hydra’s southern coast, is a secluded pebble bay reached by water taxi from the harbour. The bay is small and sheltered, and the water is emerald and clear. There are sunbeds, umbrellas and a snack kiosk on the shore. It is free of the crowds that fill the closer beaches.

  9. The convent

    The convent of Agia Efpraxia was founded in 1821, during the War of Independence, at an altitude of 452 metres. It lies 3 kilometres uphill from the town, then 150 metres along a side trail off the path to the Profitis Ilias monastery. The few nuns who keep it are known for their handiwork. It is an hour’s climb through the pines, or the trip can be made by donkey.

  10. The kitchen

    Téchnē, at Avlaki Bay, was opened in 2016 by Jason Barios and the chef Yannis Michalopoulos. Michalopoulos came home from London, where he had been head chef of two restaurants, to set up the kitchen. It serves modern Greek cooking in a courtyard next to the sea.

Anchorage Notes

  1. The harbour

    Hydra’s harbour is a crescent, and the whole town rises around it in tiers of stone: restaurants, galleries and the captains’ mansions of the old shipping fortunes. No wheeled vehicle is allowed on the island, not a car, a scooter or a bicycle. Mules, donkeys and the water taxis carry everything.

  2. Kamini

    Kamini lies a short walk west of the town: a small natural port full of fishing boats, with the pebbled cove of Small Kamini beside it. A yacht lies off its quieter quay, away from the crowds of the main harbour, in a working corner where the caïques still come and go, 10 minutes along the shore from the town.

  3. Mandraki

    Mandraki is the old port east of the town, its entrance once guarded by two small cannons; it was Hydra’s harbour in the Greek War of Independence, when the island’s fleet lay here. It has the only wholly sandy beach on Hydra, run by the resort at its head. A yacht lies in the bay a mile from the harbour, the quiet eastern alternative to the crowded town quay.

  4. Dokos

    Dokos is the island off Hydra’s northwest, home only to a few Orthodox monks and sheep herders, with the ruins of a Byzantine and Venetian castle on its eastern side. In its water lies the oldest known underwater shipwreck, a Bronze Age vessel of around 2200 BC found by Peter Throckmorton in 1975. A yacht crosses to lie in its anchorages, which are busy by day at the weekend and silent by evening.