For cocktails, while you’re watching the sunset, the bars along the cliff are the place to go for sea views, which are always more dramatic out of season. The Pirate Bar, also in the port, used to be called O Peiratis and was another haunt of Cohen’s and his friends, and it’s still very popular – chic but not too exclusive. Head to the port – there are no street names on the island – and you’ll find Roloi, Cohen’s old favourite, under the clock tower in the harbour, which is a great place to stop for an ouzo. “It is changing again now,” says Browning, alluding to a new generation of artists and writers who are beginning to discover the pleasures of Hydra beyond the tourist season, when it is emptier and more relaxed.Įating out: Hydra’s maze of tiny streets are filled with the tables of restaurants. Instead Hydra developed a glamorous reputation and in peak season it can still feel as glitzy as Capri. By that time it wasn’t a place where a young writer or musician would turn up to finish a book or write songs. After those people left, there were no more parties.”įrom the 1980s onwards, the atmosphere changed as Hydra turned from a bohemian paradise into a more exclusive resort. Whenever he threw a party, the whole island was invited. The house on the hill there”, he says pointing at a grey stone house near the port, “was owned by an American interior designer. “We mixed with artists and lots of foreigners. “There used to be some very fun, interesting people here, back in those days,” he remembers. James Browning, a Briton born in Cyprus, came to Hydra in the 1960s and is one of the last people who knew Cohen well and saw the island in those days.

So long: the musician with his lover and muse Marianne and friends George Johnston and Charmian Clift. The island has changed a lot since his days.” “A lot of the locals have left over the years,” Maria tells me, “and Cohen’s old friends have left, too, or don’t come any more.

A few streets up you can spot the terrace that he describes, and the scenery familiar to those who hang around after all the tourists have gone – the deep blue sky and sea with fog rising from it. It’s empty at the moment, while a young couple who came to pay their respects are sitting on a low wall next to it, reading his poetry aloud.Ĭohen wrote the poem Days of Kindness about his girlfriend and muse Marianne Ihlen, and their years spent here.

Cohen hadn’t visited for 15-odd years but his son, Adam Cohen, recently recorded his own album here. Maria Kontopithari, who is now in her 60s, still owns the corner store near his house and remembers him as “a very private man and a perfect gentleman”.Ī 10-minute walk from the sea, up several flights of steps and through winding alleys, the three-storey whitewashed home is now used by his children. Photograph: Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty ImagesĪ few days after his death, the front door of the traditional old house that he bought in 1960 for $1,500 is decorated with tributes, from fruit and flowers to poems and personal notes. He bought the house in the early 1960s and his family still owns it. Paying their respects: well wishers outside the summer house of Leonard Cohen.

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