Hydra
— — an island that kept the cars out.
Not only on a wall.
“A horseshoe harbour of pale stone and faded shutters, ninety minutes from the noise of Athens. Hydra banned wheeled traffic decades ago; the freight still moves by donkey and the freight still moves slowly. Leonard Cohen kept a house above the town. Painters keep coming back. The light in the early evening turns the limestone the colour of bread.
Hydra, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Hydra is an island in the Saronic Gulf, about 37 nautical miles from the port of Piraeus, reached by passenger ferry in roughly two hours. The main town wraps around a small natural harbour on the northern coast; the rest of the island is rocky, pine-scrubbed, and largely uninhabited. Cars and motorbikes are prohibited by law, a rule in force since the 1950s. Freight still moves by mule, donkey, and porter. The island's permanent population sits at around 1,900 and swells sharply in summer.
The town is built of local limestone and the dark grey schist quarried from the island itself. Most houses date to Hydra's commercial peak in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when the island's merchant fleet was among the largest in the eastern Mediterranean. Hydriot shipowners funded much of the Greek War of Independence after 1821. The harbour mansions, the archontika, were declared protected monuments in the mid-20th century, and new construction has been tightly restricted ever since. The skyline has barely changed in 150 years.
Painters have come to Hydra for the light since the 1930s, when Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas opened the house in Kamini that became the centre of a small expatriate circle. Leonard Cohen bought a house in the upper town in 1960 for 1,500 dollars and kept it for the rest of his life. The American painter Brice Marden lived part of each year on Hydra from the 1970s on. The late-afternoon light, slanted off the harbour and the pale stone, is the signature most painters chase.