So Long, Marianne: Cohen's Hydra keeps finding new audiences

Sixty years after a young Canadian poet bought a house up the hill for $1,500, Hydra's most famous love story keeps renewing itself. So Long, Marianne, the television series dramatising the years of Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen on the island — partly filmed here — introduced a whole new generation to the Hydra of the 1960s: the kerosene lamps, the artists' colony around Katsikas' grocery, the songs that began in a whitewashed room above the port.

You can feel it on the island: visitors pausing on the lane outside the Cohen house, guitars appearing at sunset near the windmill. The house remains private — admire it from the street — but the walk up through Kala Pigadia is its own reward, and the town below looks much as it did when he wrote Bird on the Wire here.

Hydra has been seducing artists since long before the cameras came. It shows no sign of stopping.