Beyond The Sea

The sun-soaked island of Hydra has long inspired artists and intellectuals from Henry Miller to Leonard Cohen, and even today with the influx of art stars and yachting billionaires, its unspoiled charm remains intact.

I had only been on Hydra a few days last summer when an astonishing boat sailed into the harbor. Shaped like a stealth fighter and bright with cartoon colors, Guilty is the private yacht of the billionaire Greek art collector Dakis Joannou. Dakis, as the Hydriots call him, is a Cypriot and one of the most famous men in this part of the Aegean. Six years ago he opened an outpost of his Athens-based Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art in an old slaughterhouse on the island. That same year he had Jeff Koons design a paint scheme to decorate his yacht, which he sails into Hydra’s discreetly affluent harbor every summer.

Guilty is a splash of New York art-world luridness among the elegant masts and Aegean colors of the other yachts. It’s the way Dakis likes it. Strolling past the waterfront cafes with their upper-class English summer immigrants and the twee boutiques housed in old sponge factories, I made my way along the dock to meet him, wondering all the while what it was like to sleep and wake in a floating art gallery on the high seas.

In almost no time a carpet had been laid out at the foot of the gangplank glittering with the word “Guilty.” Guilty of what? a visitor is bound to ask himself. On board, the genial billionaire waved me up.

“I suppose,” he deadpanned, “you had no trouble finding me?”

“I’ve been coming here for years,” Dakis said as he pointed out the pair of tall harbor-front houses he owns. “Only 2,000 people live here year-round, but in the summer it’s quite a scene. It’s one of the most haunting of the Greek islands. Outside of this port, it is virtually wild.”

Photograph by Alexia Silvagni. Produced by Konstantin Kakanias.

The yacht of billionaire art collector Dakis Joannou, for which he commissioned the artist Jeff Koons to paint the exterior, docked at Hydra’s port.

The port is ringed by bare brown hills. Salt-white houses extend on either side of the harbor — that classic effect of Greek islands — and even there on the water I could hear the cicadas rasping in the pines. It made for a startling contrast with this art-filled yacht, in whose master bedroom a neon sign by Martin Creed above the bed spelled the word “Feelings.” The David Shrigley cartoons on the walls seemed to come from a different planet.

“I love Hydra,” Dakis said as we came back into the sunlight and the clatter of pack donkeys on the quays (there are no cars allowed on Hydra). “It’s one of those places — one of the magical places.”

Each June, Dakis invites a couple hundred of the world’s most famous artists, dealers and collectors to mingle and celebrate the opening of the annual summer exhibition at the Deste foundation. One year, to open their show, Matthew Barney and Elizabeth Peyton orchestrated a dawn “procession” with a variety of animals and a large dogfish laid on a casket.