“I rented a house for $14 a month, met a girl, and stayed for 8 or 10 years. Yeah, that’s the way it was in those days”. This is how Leonard Cohen described his arrival at the Greek island of Hydra.
“Now so long, Marianne, it’s time that we began to laugh, and cry and cry and laugh about it all again”. You recognise these words, from his hit song So Long, Marianne? Marianne is the Norwegian beauty, the girl that he met on Hydra with whom he developed a long-lasting relationship, eventually even dying months apart in 2016. But not only this song is related to his love for Greece and his house on Hydra, that he bought for $1,500 back in 1960. Also ‘Bird on a wire’ was written behind that famous little desk, while staring out the window towards the Greek blue sky and seeing a bird… on a wire… Cohen said that buying the house, though it was a ‘big deal’ back then, was the best decision he ever made.
While living on Hydra, Cohen was writing steadily with a personal goal of 3 pages a day while catered for by his love Marianne. Those days he eventually published the poetry collection Flowers for Hitler (1964), and the novels The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966), as well as the book of poems Parasites of Heaven (1966). That was also the year that Leonard decided he was going to be a songwriter. He wrote many famous songs, like ‘Hallelujah’ that has been performed by over 200 artists in various languages.
Leonard Cohen actually managed to learn Greek in his twenties, really enjoyed the Greek way of life and even carried a komboloi. Cohen was Canadian and has performed concerts in front of tens of thousands of people. However, it is said that the first concert he ever gave was in the back room of the Katsikas Brothers Grocery Store on the Hydra waterfront, in 1960.
