Leonard Cohen’s haven

I was a kid when I first heard Leonard Cohen’s music. Afterwards, I would seek it out at teenage parties, as well as later, going to Paris to study in the Fine Arts School and History of Art in the Louvre School, his music always kept me company. In 1988, with his song “First we take Manhattan”, I set a goal of moving to New York. I went in 1993 and have lived there since, working as an artist. In the late 90s, an old friend, Christos Zambounis asked me to create a book with him about Hydra for his publishing house “Phereniki”. I found myself photographing some of the most beautiful houses on the planet. Among them, the house of my favourite artist Brice Marden and most importantly of the great composer, writer and singer Leonard Cohen. Setting out to photograph his house, I expected to see some luxurious villa of an internationally acclaimed music star. I was pleasantly surprised to see a humble and traditional small island house.

The time he spent in this house, was marked by his intense alcoholism, as well as his dynamic artistic output. This is when he wrote his poem collection “Flowers for Hitler” and his novels “The Favourite Game” and “Beautiful Losers”, with the first being an autobiography, the portrait of a writer that discovers his identity through writing. These three works made him known all over the world and established him as a poet in literary circles. For those days in Hydra, he said in his interview for the magazine “Musician”: “To write literature, you try to gather your belongings around you. You need a woman, kids around you. So, there’s always food for your inspiration. It’s nice to live in a beautiful and orderly house. I had all that in Hydra and so I began to write”.

In the living room, the sofa was built into the wall, dressed with a white cover. Alcoves in the thick stone wall functioned as decorative shelves, creating interesting shadows on the white surface of the wall. Old wooden carved furniture from Hydra were in all the rooms. The house’s internal doors as well as the walls, were adorned with paintings of Hydra landscapes. The same theme was painted on an old commode, on which an old Singer
sewing machine stood out. In the kitchen the fireside ledge had been preserved and had been redone to enhance its utility. Various kitchen utensils were hung around the hearth, revealing a simple but also creative approach to daily cooking.

Bird on the Wire
Bird on the Wire began in Greece, when Cohen first arrived in Hydra, there were no wires on the island, no telephones and no regular electricity. But soon telephone poles appeared, and then the wires. I would stare out the window at these telephone wires and think, how civilization had caught up with me and I wasn’t going to be able to escape after all. I wasn’t going to be able to live this eleventh-century life that I had thought I had found for myself. So that was the beginning. Then he noticed that the birds came to the wires. The next line referred to the many evenings Cohen and friends climbed the endless stairs up from the port of Hydra, drunk and singing. Often you see: three guys with the arms around each other, stumbling up the stairs and singing these impeccable thirds. He finished the song in a Hollywood motel on Sunset Boulevard in 1969.

[SOURCE: Various Positions - A Life Of Leonard Cohen, Ira B. Nadel, Random House of Canada, 1996.]