It was to Ghika’s door that Cohen came shortly after landing, but he found himself spurned. His credentials then consisted of poems published in mimeographed magazines in Montreal. In 1965, the mansion burned down and Ghika never returned to Hydra. Local legend was that Cohen had called down a curse.

The ruin has remained untouched in 52 years. I climbed the long overgrown and crumbling stairway along its western perimeter and prised open the slats of its fragmenting front door. Inside were tumbledown walls and vegetation.

Cohen soon found others willing to embrace him; a crowd of young expatriate poets, painters, idlers and dreamers. He fell in love with Norwegian model Marianne Ihlen. When the affair ended, she became the subject of his song So Long Marianne and, dressed only in a towel, she graced the back cover of his album Songs From A Room.

The bohemians gathered at Katsikas Bar, which was where Cohen made his first formal solo performance. Today it’s named the Roloi Cafe and sits uneasily among the parade of high-end boutiques and gift shops that now ring the harbour. The night I visited, there was a solitary drinker engrossed in watching football on a TV.

Douskos Taverna, a few streets away, is where Life magazine photographer James Burke snapped Cohen alongside his friends in October 1960. Little has changed. The tree with the white painted trunk around which the group clustered for their moment of international glory is clearly identifiable. Above an unpublished poem by Cohen celebrating his nights on its terrace, the image is reproduced on the taverna’s menu.

At the Pirate Bar by the harbour, I asked a waitress where the young artists of today would gravitate. A woman who overheard me said they’d still head for the Pirate Bar – known as O Peiratis to Cohen’s generation. She was Natacha Best, a painter dividing her time between the island and Paris, who fell in love with Hydra the moment she disembarked from the ferry 25 years ago.