Hydra (island)

The Tsamadou mansion, on the left side as one enters the harbour, is now a Maritime Academy.[9] The Tsamados family donated the mansion for the purpose of hosting the Greek Maritime Academy on their island. Another house, originally built for the Tsamados family on the hill overlooking the port was donated to the church to be used as a weaving school and production facility of textiles and carpets. The house now belongs to the Colloredo-Mansfeld family and became known as the Old Carpet Factory.[10]

The Tombazis mansion is now part of the Athens School of Fine Arts,[11] owned by University of Athens.[12]

The mansions of Lazaros and George Kountouriotis, Boudouris, Kriezis, Voulgaris, Sachinis, and Miaoulis all contain collections of 18th-century island furniture. The descendants of Lazarus Kountouriotis donated his mansion to the Historic-Ethnologic Institute of Greece. Today, it operates as an extension branch of the National Museum of History.

There are numerous churches and six Orthodox monasteries on the island. Two particularly noteworthy monasteries are Profitis Ilias, founded in the 10th century, and Ayia Efpraxia. Both are on a hill overlooking the main harbour.

The island's cathedral is the old Monastery of the Dormition of the Virgin and sits on the quayside in the town. The monastery contains the tomb of Lazaros Kountouriotis, the richest sea captain on Hydra, who gave his entire fortune to support the Greek War of Independence.[13]

There is evidence of farmers and herders from the second half of the third millennium BCE on the small, flat areas that are not visible from the sea. Obsidian from Milos has also been found. During the Helladic period, Hydra probably served as a maritime base for the kingdoms on the Greek peninsula. Fragments of vases, tools, and the head of an idol have been found on Mount Chorissa. There is also evidence of Mycenean-era aqueducts, supplying ships with water.

The large-scale Dorian invasion of Greece around the 12th century BCE appears to have depopulated the island. Hydra was repopulated by farmers and herders, perhaps sailing from the mainland port of Ermioni, in the 8th century BCE. Herodotus reports that toward the 6th century BCE, the island belonged to Ermioni, which sold it to Samos. Samos, in turn, ceded it to Troizina.

For much of its existence, Hydra stayed on the margins of history. The population was very small in ancient times and, except for the brief mentions in Herodotus and Pausanias, left little or no record in the history of those times.

It is clear that Hydra was populated during the Byzantine era, as vases and coins have been discovered in the area of Episkopi. However, it appears that the island again lost its population during the Latin Empire of Constantinople as its inhabitants fled the pirate depredations. On other islands, inhabitants moved inland, something that was essentially impossible on Hydra.

Among local Arvanites, the first account about their settlement was written by Antonis Miaoulis, son of admiral Andreas Miaoulis, after the end of the Greek war of independence (1830). According to this local narrative, the Hydriots descend from the Albanians who directly left Albania as refugees in the 1460s due to persecution by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II. Historiographical research shows that the Albanians didn't settle in Hydra directly from Albania in the 15th century, but from the Peloponnese (Ermionida) due to conflicts in the region with the Venetians and the Ottomans.[14] This first Albanian settlement occurred in the early 16th century and likely involved members of the same 1-2 clans.[15] That made the island primarily Albanian in ethnic character.[16] They created the modern town port and their presence was evident until the mid-20th century, when, according to T. Jochalas, the majority of the island's population was composed of immigrants from outside of Peloponnesus.[14] In the 16th century, the island began to be settled also by refugees from the warfare between the Ottomans and Venetians.[17] In the early 18th century, a last Arvanite movement from nearby areas settled in the island. Arvanitika Albanian was the language spoken by all Hydriotes. By the 19th century men had learned to speak Greek too, while women and children often didn't speak Greek. One of the reasons why Arvanitika was so enduring in Hydra as opposed to other islands which were part of the Albanian Aegean settlements was that the language was spoken and favored by the newly emerging Hydriot urban-merchant class.[18] Even in the 20th century families of the local magnates like the Koundouriotis spoke Arvanitika in Hydra.[19] Hydra was also an island where church liturgy was often held in local Arvanitika, which is a rare case as in most Orthodox Albanian communities Greek was the language of liturgy even up to the early 20th century.[19] The Arvanite community is still found on the island.[20] Nowadays they are fully assimilated.

Traditional houses

Hydra was relatively unimportant during much of the period of Ottoman rule. At the end of the sixteenth century there was a wave of migration consisting of big families from the Hellenic and Asia Minor regions to the island. Due to the infertile ground, the inhabitants turned to the sea.[21] Its naval and commercial development began in the 17th century, and its first school for mariners was established in 1645.[22] Apparently, the first truly Hydriot vessel was launched in 1657. However, the conflict between the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire limited the island's maritime development until after 1718 and the Treaty of Passarowitz. From the 17th century on, Hydra began to take on a greater importance because of its trading strength.

During the first half of the 18th century, Hydra built the same kind of vessels as were built in the other Aegean Islands: the sachtouri of 15 to 20 tons, and the latinadiko of 40 to 50 tons. The Hydriots contented themselves with trading in the Aegean, going as far as Constantinople. A great change occurred in 1757 after they launched a vessel of 250 tons. The larger boats enabled Hydra to become an important commercial port. By 1771, there were up to 50 vessels from throughout Greece in the roads. Ten years later, the island had fitted out 100 vessels.[23]

However, the Ottoman Empire and its policies constrained Hydra's economic success. Heavy tariffs and taxes limited the speed of development. The Ottoman administration limited free trade, permitting only Ottoman vessels to navigate the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, and hence to have access to the Black Sea, its ports, and the trade in grain from their hinterlands. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca changed all this. Russia gained from the Ottoman Empire the right to protect the Empire's Orthodox Christians. The religious protection had a commercial corollary: the Hydriots began to sail under the Russian flag. The treaty also provided for free passage between the Aegean and the Black Sea. Hydra entered its commercial era. Hydriot vessels carried goods between Southern Russia in the east and the Italian ports of Ancona and Livorno in the west. From 1785 on, the Hydriot shippers began to engage in commerce, not just transport. Each vessel became its own small commercial enterprise, and trade with the Levant quickly began to depend on Hydra's vessels, though not without competition from those of Spetses and Psara.

The plague of 1792 killed a large part of the population, and many people moved away. As a result, the town was almost completely abandoned for a while. By the end of the 18th century, Hydra had again become quite prosperous, with its vessels trading as far as France, Spain, and even the Americas. Napoleon presented the island with the huge silver chandelier in the cathedral as a gesture of gratitude for the Hydriots' role in running the British blockade and so bringing food to France.

Statue of Andreas Miaoulis, admiral during the Greek War of Independence.

Antonis Oikonomou starts the revolution in Hydra by Peter von Hess.

Flag of Hydra during the Greek War of Independence, displaying the Spartan maxim "Η ΤΑΝ Η ΕΠΙ ΤΑΣ".

In the 19th century, Hydra was home to some 125 boats and 10,000 sailors. The mansions of the sea captains that ring the harbor are a testament to the prosperity that shipping brought to the island, which, at the time of the Greek Revolution, had 16,000 inhabitants.

To begin with, Hydriots were far from unanimous in joining the Greek War of Independence. In April 1821, when Antonis Oikonomou expelled the governor, the Ottoman Nikolao Kokovila and proclaimed Hydra's adherence to the independence struggle, he met strong opposition from island leaders who were reluctant to lose the relatively privileged position they had under Ottoman rule. Oikonomou was imprisoned, hounded off the island and eventually his opponents sent assassins to chase and kill him in December 1821.

Still, Hydra eventually did join the cause of independence, and Hydra's contribution of some 150 ships, plus supplies, to fight against the Turks played a critical role. The Greek admiral Andreas Miaoulis, himself a settler on Hydra, used Hydriot fire ships to inflict heavy losses on the Ottoman fleet. Eventually the fleet of Hydra - along with those of the other two naval islands of Psara and Spetses - were able to wrest control of the eastern Aegean Sea from the Ottoman Empire.

The Albanian-speaking seamen of Hydra and Spetses provided the core of the Greek fleet and leading members of the Greek government, among them a one wartime president. They in some cases used Albanian with each other to prevent others on their side from reading their correspondence.[24] 

With the end of the revolution and the creation of the Greek state, the island gradually lost its maritime position in the Eastern Mediterranean, igniting an economic crisis that led to a period of hardship and unemployment. The main reason was that with the creation of the Greek state, Hydra's fleet lost the privileges that the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca and the use of the Russian flag had given it. Another reason was that the traditional families who owned the majority of the fleet failed to foresee the benefits of participating in the steam ship revolution, which significantly cut shipping operational costs through reduced crew and independence of the winds, putting them at a disadvantage vis-á-vis the new shipping companies of Piraeus, Patras, and Syros. A third reason was that the new conditions made illegal activities such as piracy impossible. Once again, many inhabitants abandoned Hydra, leaving behind their large mansions and beautiful residences, which fell into ruin. The mainstay of the island's economy became fishing for sponge. This brought prosperity again until 1932, when Egypt forbade fishing along its coast.

Between 1941 and 1943, during the Axis occupation of Greece during World War II, there was famine on Hydra. It is estimated that some eight per cent of the population died of starvation. By the end of the World War II, the Hydriots were again leaving the island; many of them went abroad.

The municipality of Hydra is twinned with:

• Ereğli, Turkey (since 1996)[34]
• Bayonne, France (since 2008)[35]