The silence is the first thing.
Not the absence of sound, which is different from silence: the ferry engine, the seabirds, the water against the hull, all of this is present as the hydrofoil from Piraeus approaches the harbor of Hydra. But when the gangway is lowered and the passengers step onto the stone quay, what is absent is the sound that every other inhabited place in Europe produces constantly and without pause: the internal combustion engine. No ignition. No exhaust. No horn. No engine idling at a light that does not exist because there are no cars and therefore no traffic signals.
The ear, trained by years of continuous exposure to this sound, notices its absence immediately and interprets it as silence. It takes a few minutes to understand that the harbor is not quiet. The donkeys are working. The men loading and unloading supplies from the boats are calling to each other. The cafes along the waterfront are full. The island is alive and busy. But the frequency of the internal combustion engine, which the contemporary world has produced without interruption for more than a century in every inhabited place it has reached, is not present here, and the quality of what the ear experiences in its absence is what the people who come to Hydra and stay are almost universally trying to describe when they say the island is different from anywhere else.
The island banned private motor vehicles at a date that the various sources do not agree on precisely, somewhere in the mid-twentieth century, but the reason the ban has lasted is not the legislation. It is the geography. The terrain of Hydra, a narrow, steep, rocky island without a single flat road of any significant length, was never hospitable to the motor vehicle in the first place. The ban formalized what the landscape had already made impractical.
The Island and Its History
Hydra is located in the Saronic Gulf, approximately 65 kilometers southwest of Athens by sea and reachable from Piraeus in under two hours by the conventional ferry services and in approximately 90 minutes by the faster hydrofoil. The island is approximately 50 square kilometers in area, of which the usable and inhabited portion is a small fraction: the terrain is predominantly steep limestone, dry in the summer heat, covered in the phrygana of the eastern Mediterranean coast, thyme and sage and cistus and the dry-country vegetation that the island’s limited water supply and exposed aspect produce.
The town of Hydra, which occupies the natural harbor on the island’s northern coast and is the only significant settlement, was the center of one of the most remarkable episodes in modern Greek maritime history. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Hydriot merchant fleet became one of the most significant in the eastern Mediterranean, its captains trading across the Aegean, the Adriatic, the Black Sea, and beyond in the years when the Ottoman Empire’s control of Greek maritime commerce was at its most extensive and when the combination of nautical skill, commercial intelligence, and the willingness to take risks that the island culture produced made the Hydriots among the most successful merchant sailors in the region.
The wealth that the maritime trade generated is visible in the architecture of the town: the large stone captains’ houses that climb the hillside above the harbor, their facades severe and their interiors preserving the material culture of the eighteenth-century prosperous merchant household. These houses were built when Hydra was a place of international commercial consequence, when the harbor was full of ships and the streets were full of sailors and merchants, and their current condition reflects both the quality of the original construction and the economic decline that followed the end of the maritime age that had produced them.
The island’s contribution to the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s was substantial and specific: the Hydriot fleet, which included among its captains the figures of Andreas Miaoulis and Lazaros Koundouriotis whose names appear in the independence war’s naval history, provided the firepower and the seafaring experience that the independence movement’s land forces could not have substituted. The tactic of the fire ship, the vessel loaded with combustible material and directed at the enemy fleet, was a Hydriot contribution to the naval conduct of the war whose effectiveness the Ottoman losses at the battles of the independence period document.
The Donkeys and What They Do
The donkey, the mule, and the horse that carry freight and passengers through the lanes of Hydra are working animals rather than tourist attractions, and the distinction matters for understanding what their presence means.
The supplies that the ferry brings to Hydra must reach the houses and hotels and restaurants and construction sites that are distributed across the island’s steep terrain. There are no roads on which a vehicle could make these deliveries. The goods must be carried by the animals, up the stone staircases and along the cobbled paths that are the island’s only internal circulation system, and the demands of this work, the weight carried, the steepness of the terrain, the combination of hard stone surfaces and sometimes loose rubble, are the demands that the island’s working animals are bred and trained for.
A Hydriot animal owner manages an asset that the island’s economy depends on: a horse or donkey in working condition on Hydra has a commercial value that the island’s logistics cannot function without, and the care of these animals, their feeding, their shoeing, their health, is the specialized knowledge that the island’s working animal tradition has developed over the centuries of the island’s dependence on them. The tourist who photographs the donkey being loaded at the harbor is photographing the island’s freight system.
The rhythm of the working animal’s movement through the town is the rhythm that Hydra’s daily life is organized around: the clip of hooves on cobblestone is the sound of freight moving, not of horses performing for visitors. The donkeys loaded with building materials going up the steep lanes above the harbor in the early morning are going to the construction sites where the restoration of the captains’ houses proceeds in the pace that the island’s logistics permit.
The Artistic History
The connection between Hydra and the tradition of mid-twentieth century artistic and intellectual life that brought Leonard Cohen, painters of the generation that gathered in the island’s cafes in the 1960s and 1970s, and the community of expatriate artists who made Hydra their working base is a connection with a documented history.
Leonard Cohen arrived in Hydra in 1960, the year after he had published his first collection Let Us Compare Mythologies. He paid the equivalent of approximately 1,500 dollars for the house on the island that he would return to for decades, a white-washed stone structure typical of the island’s architecture that he furnished simply and in which he worked on the poetry and early prose that established his voice. The conditions that Hydra provided in this period, the relative cheapness of life on the island, the absence of the urban distractions of Montreal or London or New York, the community of other artists and writers working in the same conditions of productive isolation, are the conditions that Cohen and his contemporaries consistently described as enabling work that the busier environments of their careers had not.
The Australian painter Sidney Nolan visited the island and the various Greek and expatriate artists who worked there across the decades of its most intense artistic colonization produced a visual record of the island in the conditions that preceded the full development of its contemporary tourist infrastructure: a record of the harbor and the lanes and the light in the decades when Hydra was poor and beautiful rather than prosperous and beautiful.
The filming of Boy on the Dolphin in 1957, which brought Sophia Loren to Hydra, documented the visual quality of the island’s harbor and architecture in the decade before mass tourism had developed the infrastructure to make it a destination. The film’s legacy on the island is primarily the story of how Hydra entered the international imagination as a destination.
Living on Hydra | The Practical Dimensions
Hydra is not a place that people live accidentally. The conditions of the island, the absence of motor vehicles, the dependence on the ferry for all external connection, the steep terrain that makes every errand a physical undertaking, the limited commercial infrastructure of an island community of approximately 3,000 permanent residents, make living on Hydra a deliberate choice rather than a default one.
The ferry is the island’s lifeline and its clock. The schedule of arrivals and departures from Piraeus determines the rhythm of the week in a way that no other single factor does: supplies arrive on the ferry, visitors arrive on the ferry, and the pace of the ferry schedule is the pace within which the island’s commercial and social life operates. The winter reduction in ferry frequency, from the multiple daily services of the summer peak to the more limited schedule of the months when the tourist population has largely departed, is the winter reduction in the island’s external connection and therefore in the pace and variety of its daily life.
Property on Hydra is significantly more expensive than on comparable Greek islands without the island’s artistic and cultural cachet. The combination of genuine scarcity of buildable land, the island’s proximity to Athens and therefore its accessibility for weekend and holiday use by Athenian residents, and the international reputation that decades of artistic association have produced makes Hydra property among the most expensive in the Saronic Gulf. Rental options exist and are more accessible than purchase, particularly in the off-season when the island’s permanent community lives at its most characteristic pace.
The expat community that has established itself on Hydra over the decades of its artistic reputation is small, close-knit, and characteristically self-selected for the willingness to accept the island’s conditions: the lack of vehicles, the physical demands of the terrain, the ferry dependency, and the quietness that the absence of motor traffic produces. The residents who stay are the residents who have decided that what the island provides is worth the inconveniences that those same conditions impose.
The Harbor in the Evening
The harbor of Hydra in the early evening, in the hour before the sun drops behind the hills that rise above the western edge of the town and the quality of the light changes from the direct gold of the afternoon to the softer diffused light of the hour before dark, is the experience of the island at its most concentrated.
The cafes along the waterfront fill with the mix of residents and visitors that the island’s scale produces: the island is small enough that most of the people at the tables are recognizable to most of the other people at the tables, and the conversation that moves between the tables and the bar and the waterfront has the character of a conversation in a village rather than a resort. The boats in the harbor, the fishing boats that the island’s small fishing fleet uses and the private sailing boats that the island’s accessibility from Athens makes it a weekend destination for, are the boats that the evening light is falling on.
The donkeys that have been working since the first ferry arrived in the morning are resting. The freight has been delivered. The stone lanes above the harbor are quieter. The sound is the sound of the harbor in the evening: the water, the voices, the boats, and the absence of the sound that would be present if there were cars.
Getting There and When to Come
The Flying Dolphin hydrofoil service from the port of Piraeus takes approximately 90 minutes to reach Hydra, with multiple departures daily during the summer season and reduced frequency in the winter months. The conventional ferry, which also serves Poros and Spetses on the same route, takes approximately two hours.
The summer months from June through September bring the maximum visitor density to the island, the harbor filling with day visitors and the accommodation operating at full capacity in July and August. The spring months of April and May, and the autumn months of September and October, provide the conditions that most reward extended engagement with the island: warm enough weather, manageable visitor numbers, the island’s permanent community visible in its daily routines rather than submerged beneath the summer season’s visitors, and the quality of the spring and autumn light on the island’s stone and water that the high overhead sun of midsummer does not produce.
The winter on Hydra, from November through March, is the island at its most purely itself: the population contracted to its permanent core, the tourist infrastructure largely closed, the ferry schedule reduced, and the quality of the quiet that the island maintains through the months when its reputation is not actively drawing visitors available in its most complete form.
At Olympus Estate, Wanderlust Greece guides you across the sacred and storied terrain of the Hellenic world. Hydra’s car ban is not the story. The story is the harbor in the eighteenth century, the captains’ houses above it, the donkeys that have been carrying freight up the stone lanes since before the internal combustion engine existed, and the silence that you hear when you step off the ferry and realize what is absent. That silence is the island. Spend at least two nights.
