by Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell (An edited extract from Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955-1964, Monash University Press 2018)
There was no shortage of venues for Hydra’s expatriates to gather for socialising, drinking, gossiping, arguing and flirting. During the long summer months the agora opened up into a generous spread of tables and chairs spilling out of doorways and reaching towards the dockside, while others operated from the alleys and side-streets that rose away from the harbour. There was, however, one venue that became the focus for expatriate social life; Katsikas, a one-stop kafenio, bar and grocery shop run by brothers Antony and Nick Katsikas.
Katsikas stood at the western corner of the dockside, immediately facing the harbour, where the wide promenade expanded into a small public square, separated from the Poseidon Hotel by a narrow laneway known to the expatriates as Donkey Shit Lane. As James Burke wrote in 1960, this area was known as “Katsikas corner”
"Katsikas is an old-fashioned general store and also provides relaxatives like wine, brandy and ouzo. The drinks are served at tables on the quai in front of the store during the day, and in the stock room behind the in bad weather. The foreign artists and writers who gather at Katsikas revolve around George and Charmian Johnston, who were the founders of the Katsikas club, as it might be called.]"
There were several reasons why Katsikas made an ideal gathering place. These included its year-round opening and long hours; the availability of both the inside room for use in winter and the sun-drenched outdoor terrace in summer; the prime dockside location with a good view of incoming ferries; and perhaps most importantly, the willingness of the Katsikas brothers to extend generous credit to the island’s longer-staying foreigners.
It was Johnston and Clift who led the other expatriates to Katsikas when they chose it as their preferred place to socialise and drink. In Peel Me a Lotus Clift reported how they spent their first Hydra winter at Katsikas where they gathered “among the flour-sacks and oil-jars and painted tin water-tanks and strings of onions and soft white festoons of cotton-waste: a sort of social club evolved to relieve the boredom of an island winter.”
This eclectic over-abundance of general goods was characteristic of the shop. Little was intended for the tourist trade—Katsikas was primarily there to meet the needs of islanders for basic foodstuffs and household and boating supplies, providing a very mercantile yet domestic flavour to the inside gatherings
Leonard Cohen also recalled how the charismatic Australians were regularly available at Katsikas to offer practical support and advice.
"They [Clift and Johnston] were extremely helpful to all young people coming to the island. Many stopped at their table at Katsikas to drink with them and get advice on everything from where to buy their kerosene to what chemical to use to stop the toilet smelling. They were the focal point for foreigners on the island."
Other business was also conducted at Katsikas because, as Clift wrote, it was “where you hired masons and plumbers and consulted the caique captain about transporting goods from Athens and talked to the donkey men and bought water from the freighter and read your mail and arranged your social activities and entertained visitors.”
The foreign colony’s reputation as bohemians, artists and existentialists and their propensity to marry talk and argument, was born of the long hours they spent at Katsikas. As the spring and summer months progressed residents and visitors gathered in numbers in the sunshine to talk and to drink, to watch and to wait, often to return in the evening to talk, drink and wait some more. Clift wrote of the hours lingering on the agora that,
"mostly we talk, individually, severally, and at last all together, hurling and snatching at creeds, doctrines, ideas, theories, raging through space and time like erratic
meteorites rushing on in the full ignorance as to either our origins or destinations, until at last we come to the blazing point of exhaustion."
Not all the dockside talk was driven by existential angst, literary one-upmanship, or the world-weary posturing of escapees from modernity. Much of it was light-hearted, flirtatious, gossip-laden—the usual grist of daily life milled by shifting personal circumstances and relationships. It was easy to simply enjoy the beauty, revel in the talk, and pass the time, with nothing so necessary that it detracted from the moment, and no work so pressing that it could not wait another day. It was a place where, in Clift’s words, the endless chatter drifted on after dark, while “the dark water laps and laps with the soft swish of silk and the night presses down around the town, warm and close like a cloak, soft as velvet, heavy with salt and the scent of white flowers.”
Expats and visitors alike found themselves given over to the beauty of the moment, and to relationships that were intense, fluctuating, and in some cases on the edge of social convention. To these liberal-minded young men and women Hydra provided an intoxicating opportunity to shrug off their middle-class values and surrender to the enticement of artistic bohemianism.
Evening at Katsikas, including Charmian Clift, George Johnston, Leonard Cohen, members of the Katsikas family and others, c1960.
In its current incarnation Katsikas carries on as the Roloi Café, a bar-cum-restaurant indistinguishable from its neighbours. The renovations that many years ago removed the famed backroom have produced a more functional open space, although a keen eye will detect the ghost of former dividing walls. One thing that has not changed, however, is that “Katsikas corner” is prime island real estate, with the view taking in as always the long stretch of bustling dockside commerce; the blazingly coloured caiques and pleasure craft; the comings and goings of ferries and yachts; the stoop-shouldered patience of the donkeys; the terraced embrace of the town; and the comforting back drop of the Peloponnese seen across the narrow stretch of gull-spotted gulf. It remains a place to sit, to watch, and to talk.
The authors, Dr. Paul Genoni and Prof. Tanya Dalziell are presenting a series of seminars, and writing workshops on Hydra 17-23 October, 2025 in a unique literary adventure for Writers, Readers, and Travellers. FIND OUT MORE
YOU ARE WARMLY INVITED TO COME ALONG AND JOIN US FOR COFFEE
AND MEET THE AUTHORS IN PERTH on 23rd MARCH, 2025
Join us at The Bodhi Tree Book Cafe,
located cnr Oxford Street and Scarborough Beach Road, Mt Hawthorn,
anytime between 10 and 1 pm.
SHOULD YOU DECIDE TO ENROL FOR THIS RETREAT ON THE DAY YOU'LL SAVE Euro 150!
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