Hýdra

wild and naked perfection...a rock which rises out of the sea like a huge loaf of petrified bread. Henry Miller

Hýdra is a long, grey, and extremely fashionable rock with an outrageously picturesque town of stone and pastel mansions rising steeply over the harbour. As the last sea captains and merchants moved out, artists, writers and their camp followers moved in.

The Albanian ancestors of Greece’s great modern painter, Níkos Hadjikyriákos Ghíkas, had settled on Hýdra in the 17th century and were lived in a 40 room mansion, one of the largest on the island where he entertained Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Cyril Connolly, Rex Warner, Norman Mailer and Patrick Leigh Fermor.

They paved the way for the bohemians of the late 50s and 60s and today’s glitterati, although when Ghíkas married Barbara Hutchinson, Rex Warner’s second wife, his housekeeper was so cross she burned the house down; the ruins, high above Kamíni harbour, are still there.