When Shelley Dark lands solo on the Greek island of Hydra for two weeks in the dead of winter, she’s not chasing sunny beaches. She’s hunting a pirate—her husband’s great-great-grandfather and Australia’s first Greek convict. Armed with an umbrella, a cashmere scarf, and zero Greek skills, Shelley is ready to conquer the archives. But Hydra has other ideas: fresh seafood, exhilarating hikes, cats, donkeys, and warm, eccentric locals. What starts as a frantic quest soon reveals that the real treasures are the ones you weren’t looking for.
Funny, sparkling and full of heart, Hydra in Winter is the ideal read for lovers of travel books, history buffs, aspiring seadogs, seasoned travelers and armchair adventurers alike. Readers in Australia propelled it to #1 in Travel Writing, Humour Essays, and Solo Travel on Amazon Australia, and it was mentioned as a Notable Book for 2025 in the national newspaper The Weekend Australian.
Reading Greece* spoke to Shelley Dark about the book, the challenges she was faced with while turning history into a literary narrative, and her own adventures in Hydra while writing the book.
Your debut travel memoir Hydra in Winter: An Island Escape in Search of a Greek Pirate narrates your transformative journey to a storied Greek island. Tell us a few things about the book.
My travel memoir Hydra in Winter began life on our cattle farm in the Australian bush, when I discovered a family secret: that my husband is the great-great-grandson of Ghikas Voulgaris—one of seven pirates from Hydra who were convicted by the English in Malta in 1828 during the War of Independence and shipped off to Australia as convicts. I was ready to trade in my boots for an eye patch right then!
Once my husband and I retired to the beach, piecing together Ghikas’ story became my passion and an excuse to hop on a plane, sending me across the globe to Hydra itself—which, much to my delight and relief, has remained virtually unchanged for centuries. I wandered the jewel-bright harbour, visited the Hydra Municipal Archives, admired the whitewashed mansions, climbed the steep stone steps, and listened to the clip-clop of donkeys.
Hydra in Winter is my love letter to my first breath of Aegean air. Equal parts travel diary and armchair history, it’s as much about uncovering Ghikas’ story as it is about rewriting my own.
The book uncovers a little-known chapter of early Greek-Australian migration and highlights the tiny island of Hydra’s pivotal naval role in the War of Independence. How challenging was it to turn history into a literary narrative?
Ghikas Voulgaris presented a historical thread and I pulled it! My search for his story turned into the narrative of a travel memoir. I had no knowledge of modern Greek history, and it was years before I would set foot on Hydra. So between cattle musters and farm garden chores, I searched endlessly online, devoured Greek history books, especially on the Greek revolution, visited Australian settings where Ghikas lived, and inhabited Australian libraries and archives. I was a woman obsessed. I lived, ate and breathed that period of history, and his life story. I was fascinated to learn that a tiny island like Hydra could have achieved such enormous prosperity early in the nineteenth century, and then, along with Psara and Spetses, bankrolled the naval wars. My trip to Hydra brought the whole fabulous setting into startling focus.
“What struck me most about Hydra? It’s not just the stunning setting—that’s a given. It’s the way the island sidesteps all the pressures of modern life.” Tell us more.
If you visit Hydra in winter, it’s as if someone has hit the mute button on modern deadlines. There are no car horns to jolt you awake, no traffic jams, except for a line of donkeys—just the gentle rhythm of church bells marking the hours, the clack of rigging on boats moored in the harbour, fishermen unloading the catch as harbour cats weave between their ankles, and cafés where your only mission is the next perfect espresso. One Saturday outside my window, a fisherman and his wife quietly mended their nets while a transistor radio played a bouzouki serenade to the sea. Local taverna owners served me platters of freshly caught seafood, vine-leaf dolmades, creamy taramosalata, sugar-dusted amygdalota, and crunchy flaked-almond toffee—always with a warm kaliméra and an invitation to stay a while—and I never said no.
I pressed my hand against two-feet-thick stone walls—a living agalma of Hydra’s past that have stood through war and revolution, and spent two weeks in the mansion once owned by Ghikas’ uncle, breathing in centuries of history. When you walk everywhere, around the port, up the cobbled stone steps, along the coastline, the island insists you be present, live andante, leave your phone in your pocket. On a chilly winter afternoon under racing clouds, I hiked to the hilltop monastery of Profitis Ilias and was rewarded with a full sweep of the Argolic Gulf and the powdered blue line of the Peloponnese. Time paused to allow me to catch my breath and unlock my writer’s voice. I truly saw Hydra, and in turn, myself.
You are already working on Son of Hydra, a historical novel delving into Ghikas Voulgaris’s remarkable life. Give us a glimpse of your next writing venture.
Son of Hydra is the story that picks up where Hydra in Winter left off—only this time the reader is in Ghikas’ shoes. He starts out as a Hydriot shipowner’s son whose lofty dreams of status and power collide with the brutal grind of a protracted war. When he and his sailor friends turn pirate (or palikaria?), and are condemned to death by the English, only to be spared and transported to the penal colony of New South Wales, his famous name is worthless and he’s reduced to tending sheep as a lowly shepherd, far from the Argolic island he still calls home. When Mary arrives in his life, her independent Irish spirit shatters every patriarchal notion of womanhood he once held. From Hydra’s sun-baked port to the dust of the Australian bush, the novel charts his evolution from entitled aristocrat to a man who discovers that true worth is measured not by wealth or rank but by loyalty, love, and the courage to begin again. If Hydra in Winter was your island escape in search of Ghikas Voulgaris, Son of Hydra is the deeper odyssey that finally shapes him. Publication in late 2025.
*Interview by Athina Rossoglou
TAGS: LITERATURE & BOOKS | READING GREECE
