How This Charming Greek Island Has Turn out to be a Shocking Artwork Vacation spot—With Fashionable Events and Pop-up Galleries

Touring to Hydra is often a calming, virtually soporific affair.

The tiny Greek island, solely 90 minutes by ferry from Athens, has been famend for generations as a dreamy, car-free outpost the place the one visitors sound is the clip-clop of donkey hooves and essentially the most hectic choice is which white wine to decide on with dinner. However I used to be heading there in mid-June, when Hydra is an offbeat cease on the art-world circuit and the power resembles that of a wild night time at Artwork Basel Miami Seaside.

The cultural frenzy had begun earlier that day in Athens, with brunch on the art-filled mansion of Greek collectors Dakis and Lietta Joannou. It was a lavish affair with a guide bazaar, buffet, and cocktail bar spilling onto expansive, sun-dappled patios the place movie star artists just like the Joannous’ good friend Jeff Koons mingled with elegantly coiffed curators from Zurich, London, and Cologne. 

Mid-afternoon, I joined a bunch of trendy Greek artists in a convoy of taxis certain for the Athenian port of Piraeus, simply in time to catch the 5:30 p.m. quick ferry throughout the Saronic Gulf to Hydra. Quickly we had been all gaping in marvel on the first glimpse of the fabled island that Henry Miller memorably described in 1939 as having a “wild and bare perfection.” He praised its “aesthetically excellent” port, the place blue-and-white buildings cluster like a stadium above the harbor in “the very epitome of…flawless anarchy.” 

No sooner had we stepped ashore than we had been whisked through a five-minute boat trip to Mandraki Bay, the place the gallery Wilhelmina’s has operated in a splendid Nineteenth-century mansion since 2023. Because the solar dipped beneath the horizon, a raucous reception started for a bunch present referred to as “Magic Mirror,” which showcased 33 rising Greek and worldwide artists, nearly all of whom had been girls. Wine flowed. Tables groaned with treats: plates of seafood, bowls of Greek salad, tubs of plump olives. Extra visitors arrived by foot and boat, till the gallery was mobbed. 

Because the festivities wound down at midnight, Wilhelmina von Blumenthal, the gallery’s younger U.Okay.-born director, defined that she had arrange in Hydra after a visit to the island within the fall of 2022. “It was all very natural,” she mentioned. “I got here for a protracted weekend and stumbled throughout this beautiful area. On the time it was coated in cobwebs and stuffed with odds and ends, extra like a storage room. I mentioned to the proprietor, ‘This could make a lovely gallery,’ and he mentioned, ‘What a good suggestion!’ ” 

Von Blumenthal’s co-curator, Greek artist Irini Karayannopoulou, was thrilled by the enthusiastic turnout for the occasion. “We’d deliberate on 100 visitors,” she mused. “It might have been 150? Possibly 250?” Von Blumenthal piped in: “It’s  drawback to have!”

There’s a pleasing symmetry to this creative resurgence on Hydra (pronounced ee-dra). The rocky speck within the Aegean has loved a mythic standing amongst vacationers for the reason that early twentieth century, when it first turned a hangout for bohemians equivalent to Miller and the Greek poet George Seferis. It was rediscovered after World Battle II by the likes of Lawrence Durrell and two Australian writers, George Johnston and Charmian Clift, who turned the anchors of a brand new expat group. In 1960, the 26-year-old singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen purchased a home on the island, the place he would stay for the following seven years, a part of that point along with his Norwegian-born girlfriend and muse, Marianne Ihlen.

The Roloi Café, in an area close to the docks that was a well-liked artists’ hangout, shows an array of black-and-white pictures from that point. In latest a long time, Hydra has maintained its magical aura, largely because of the absence of visitors—everybody will get round by foot, boat, or donkey—and limits on new building. 

Once I first visited the island just a few years in the past, I spent per week indulging in what Clift as soon as referred to as “summertime, playtime, easy-living time, lotus-eating time.” I not often strayed from the trail that led 100 yards from the port’s tavernas to Hydronetta, a sublime bar perched on a cliffside. Between glasses of chilled white, I might descend steps carved into the rocks and dive straight into the waves. Later, again in New York, it was onerous to consider visiting Greek mates after they instructed me that sleepy Hydra was truly a sizzling spot for modern artwork. And so final summer season I set forth to discover this encounter between tradition and nature on the lavishly eulogized Greek island.

After the reception at Wilhelmina’s, I didn’t have far to journey: I used to be staying on the new Mandraki Beach Resort, just a few steps from the island’s solely sandy seashore. Though it gives state-of-the-art luxurious, together with personal plunge swimming pools, its two-century-old constructions are part of quirky Greek folklore: they had been the previous shipyards and naval base of a revered, semi-piratical independence hero named Admiral Andreas Miaoulis, who set sail from this cove to defeat the Ottoman Turks in 1826. (Each June, the island holds the Miaoulia Competition, a 10-day celebration that climaxes in a re-creation of the decisive naval battle of Geronda with fireworks, music, and the ceremonial burning of a ship within the harbor.) Poetically sufficient, Wilhelmina’s is positioned in Miaoulis’s former mansion.

Because of the hawklike oversight of historic edifices by Hydriot authorities, renovation of the lodge was painstaking. The supervisor, Arthur Fitzwilliam, who started coming to Hydra when he was a teen within the Sixties, defined that after getting the lease in 2016, he spent 18 months acquiring permits to make sure that authentic particulars had been maintained. “It was a mixture of structure and archaeology,” he mentioned. The method included replicating the chemical composition of the 18th-century mortar. “It took three months simply to seek out the appropriate lab and to get them to interrupt down its six components!”

The next night time, Hydra’s jet-set scene was in full swing. Ripples of pleasure might be felt within the port as Dakis Joannou’s mega-yacht, cheekily named Responsible, glided to the docks. It was onerous to overlook: Jeff Koons designed the outside of the vessel with jagged geometric patterns, a Cubist-like effort primarily based on the “razzle dazzle” camouflage utilized by the British and U.S. navies in World Battle I, whose goal was to not conceal ships however to make their outlines complicated.

All the harborfront was taken over by a avenue social gathering hosted by Joannou’s Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art. At nightfall, a parade of artwork lovers strolled east of the port to the Projectspace Slaughterhouse, one other up to date historic area. Since 2022, the cliffside gallery has been topped by Koons’s gilded, 30-foot-diameter Wind Spinner, a picture of Apollo, the historic Greek god of the solar and artwork, with metallic rays rotating round his round face. Inside, American artist George Rental’s disturbingly grotesque portraits had been on view in an exhibition referred to as “The Mad and the Lonely.” (“Appears like my relationship life,” quipped one customer.) Dakis, as Hydriots fondly name him, was fortunately working the group. After darkish, again on the port, Deste threw a free celebration: islanders and guests danced to stay bands on a stage as wine, beer, and ouzo flowed, and souvlaki sandwiches had been handed out to one and all.

By the following afternoon, the artwork crowd had decamped and Hydra returned to its serene summer season tempo, with different low-key artwork websites revealing themselves like sculptural rocks at low tide. For the remainder of the week, utilizing the Mandraki Seaside Resort as a base, I began every day in time-honored Hydriot type—diving off the jetty, having a breakfast of fruit, Greek yogurt, and thick black espresso—then setting off on a unusual cultural tour.

Given the strict limits on new building on Hydra, it was maybe unsurprising that the string of artwork areas I visited had been, like my lodge, all in charmingly renovated historic constructions. At nightfall in the future, I climbed the port’s steep, cobblestoned lanes and clambered beneath stone arches to go to the Old Carpet Factory, a recording studio that doubles as a gallery in an imposing mansion with image home windows and panoramic views. The exhibition, “The Warp of Time,” featured hanging modern tapestries by Helen Marden on the partitions that echoed the century-old handwoven carpet from the island’s Soutzoglou Carpets firm on the ground. “Weavings from 1924 beneath us, weavings from 2024 above,” mused proprietor Stephan Colloredo-Mansfeld, who runs the area along with his Russian-born accomplice and curator, Ekaterina Juskowsi. “We’re surrounded by continuity.” Within the courtyard, the phrase moonshine was projected on a wall and guests tasted samples of tsipouro, a kind of Greek brandy.

The subsequent night, I strolled one other winding lane to Hydrogoios Arts & Culture, a part-time exhibition area that occupies a 240-year-old mansion. Von Blumenthal and Karayannopoulou had been internet hosting a continuation of their “Magic Mirror” present. The 2 curators, who promote rising artists, have gotten established on the island because the scrappy, bohemian counterpart to Deste. 

As musicians strummed and crowds chatted across the stone cistern, Ioanna Stroumpouli, Hydrogoios’s co-owner, and Tassos Lagadianos, its caretaker, proudly confirmed off the constructing’s vintage options. One room had a picket boat hull for a ceiling, and stone arches had been embedded within the entrance. The outside partitions had been a fortress-like thickness; they’d been constructed to guard the inhabitants from pirates. However they had been most excited to point out me the herb backyard. “These are our smelling herbs,” Stroumpouli mentioned, grinding up tiny recent leaves and placing them to my nostril. “Oregano. Rosemary. And this one could be very salty—I don’t even know its identify in Greek!”

There have been completely satisfied accidents. Whereas visiting the waterfront Historic Archives Museum of Hydra, I stumbled into the Hydra Book Club. This bookstore and group heart, run by American expat Josh Hickey, is dedicated to the island’s wealthy literary and creative custom and has a strikingly designed namesake journal. Different areas I heard about by means of phrase of mouth. For 25 years, the artist Dimitrios Antonitsis has curated reveals in areas across the island as a part of the Hydra Faculty Initiatives, I used to be knowledgeable, together with “the previous schoolhouse.”

He doesn’t promote himself on an internet site or social media, however I managed to seek out him within the Lyceum, or “new schoolhouse,” a string of empty school rooms the place he was presiding over an interesting group present that included an astonishing assortment of surreal gold jewellery made by cult British artist Leonora Carrington in 2008. (A extra everlasting jewellery exhibit is artist Elena Votsi’s boutique within the port city; she creates necklaces that play with the standard evil-eye allure, summary variations of the solar and mountains, and bronze photographs of island donkeys.)

Everybody on the artwork areas was so amiable and open that the majority nights I’d one way or the other discover myself invited to sundown cocktails at Hydronetta or the Windmill Bar, the place tables and chairs had been set round a medieval stone turret. (The landmark is also called the “Sophia Loren windmill,” because it was featured in her 1957 movie Boy on a Dolphin.) A bunch dinner can be held on the eatery known as “the hen woman,” or beneath the gnarled olive tree at Xeri Elia Douskos café, the setting for a well-known {photograph} of Cohen strumming a guitar subsequent to Clift. The festivities would proceed on the tiny sq. fronting 1821 Hydra, a cocktail bar that sits on the heart of a focus of nightspots jokingly known as the Bermuda Triangle: “You enter and one way or the other get misplaced,” German-born artwork curator Katharina Bosch, who spends her summers on Hydra, warned me. “You have a look at your watch and understand it’s 3 a.m.”

And each night time, I’d both stroll across the coast alongside a footpath lit by the moon and stars, or take a ship throughout glassy waters, again to Mandraki. 

Islands can really feel like self-contained worlds. I knew that small ferries usually left from the primary port to different corners of Hydra, however in the summertime warmth they appeared like impossibly far-flung provinces. Then, on my final day, I used to be persuaded to take an expedition with one of many artists I had met at Wilhelmina’s, Lindsey Calla, who was raised in New Jersey and visited Hydra usually earlier than shifting there full-time in 2023. I had admired two of her photographs on the gallery, which regarded like summary work however had been truly images of Hydra’s wild coast. Calla provided to point out me the place they had been taken.

We boarded a vessel hardly greater than a fishing boat that took us 15 minutes west to the village of Vlichos, then adopted a coastal path and scrambled down a cliffside to a pebbly cove. I all of the sudden acknowledged the colours of earth and sea and the froth of the waves from her artworks. “That is the essence of Hydra,” Calla instructed me. “The traditional, blood-red cliffs; the wine-dark sea of Homer; the froth of the crashing surf.”

Afterward, we clambered again up the cliff to Tassia’s Tavern, on the Four Seasons Hydra—which, in charming Greek trend, is a small beachfront inn fully unrelated to the worldwide luxurious chain—and had a lunch of grilled sardines, feta salad, and ice-cold retsina, white wine with a touch of pine taste. I prefer to suppose that the island hedonists of the previous, Henry Miller and Charmian Clift—to not point out the commemorated bard of Hydra, Leonard Cohen—would have accredited. 

A model of this story first appeared within the June 2025 concern of Journey + Leisure beneath the headline “Muse of the Mediterranean.”