Hydra, Greece — Leonard Cohen's Island

The Greek island of Hydra, in the Saronic Gulf southwest of Athens, was where Leonard Cohen lived intermittently from 1960 to the mid-1960s and where he wrote much of the poetry and fiction that established him as a literary figure before his music career began. Cohen purchased a small whitewashed house on the island for $1,500 in 1960 — the last significant amount of money from a small inheritance — and lived there with the Norwegian woman Marianne Ihlen, who became one of the central presences of his creative life and who inspired some of his most celebrated songs, including 'So Long, Marianne'. Hydra in the early 1960s was a gathering place for artists, writers, and expatriates; the island had no motorised vehicles, no television, and a pace of life that was entirely removed from the modern world.

Cohen wrote his first two novels — The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966) — substantially on Hydra, along with the poetry collections The Spice-Box of Earth and Flowers for Hitler. The island gave him the solitude, the Mediterranean light, and the distance from Canadian literary life that allowed his imagination to develop. When he returned to North America in the late 1960s and began performing his songs in New York folk venues, he carried the sensibility that Hydra had helped form.

Hydra is accessible from the port of Piraeus in Athens by high-speed ferry and is a popular destination for visitors interested in Greek island life and the bohemian artistic culture of the early 1960s. Cohen's house, though privately owned, is known in the community. The island retains its prohibition on motorised vehicles. Cohen returned to Hydra many times throughout his life, including shortly before his death in 2016, and maintained an abiding emotional connection to the place where his creative life had found its form.