By 1821 Hydra's merchant fleet numbered roughly 150 armed ships, more hulls than several European states could put to sea. The island grew almost nothing of its own.
Its fortune came from freight — grain runs to Marseille, blockade profits during the Napoleonic wars, and captains who converted cargo brigs into gun platforms. That money built the harbour a Hydra Poros Aegina Day Cruise from Athens still enters today: a grey amphitheatre of arhontika mansions in cut stone, quarried on the island and finished by Venetian-trained masons. Wheeled traffic has been prohibited since the 1950s. Mules, water taxis and marble steps do the work instead.
Aegina, the first landfall on most Athens three-island cruises, carries the older claim. Its silver 'turtle' staters, struck in the sixth century BC, count among the first coins minted anywhere in Europe. The Temple of Aphaia, completed around 500 BC, stands on a pine ridge above Agia Marina with two dozen columns still upright; its pediment sculptures were shipped to Munich in 1811. In 1827 the island served as the first capital of the modern Greek state, and the Kapodistrias orphanage still faces the fishing quay. Above the ferry berth, a single Doric column of the Temple of Apollo marks Kolona hill — the name means simply column.
Poros is the quietest island on a Hydra Poros Aegina Day Cruise from Athens tour, and the closest to the mainland: a channel roughly 370 metres wide separates it from Galatas in the Peloponnese. Above the town, the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Kalaureia sheltered the orator Demosthenes, who took poison there in 322 BC rather than surrender to Macedon. A whitewashed clock tower, raised in 1927, holds the ridge over the pantiled roofs. Across the water the Lemonodasos, a terraced grove of some 30,000 lemon trees, climbs from a shingle beach into the hills.
Together these three define the inner ring of the Saronic Gulf, all within a short sail of Piraeus. Saronic Gulf island-hopping cruises have traced roughly this line since the 1960s, when Athens exported its weekend habit to visitors. Public access to the islands themselves costs 0 EUR, with cruise fees paid to operators, and the quays at Hydra Port, Hydra 180 40, never formally close. What Hydra Poros Aegina Day Cruise from Athens tours compress into one day is three distinct maritime histories — coinage, cult and commerce — laid end to end along a single wake.
12 hr
