“Danger – Keep away”, reads a sign on the wall of a white-painted house on the Greek island of Hydra. An elaborate scaffolding arrangement props up the building’s jutting first floor. I walk beneath its crumbling plaster into a narrow passageway. On the right-hand wall is an arched entrance behind a gate that’s padlocked shut. Through the metal grille, I see several large ships’ anchors leaning against the walls – alongside plastic water bottles, a battered cardboard box and piles of rubble. A sign warns that CCTV is in operation. But beneath the peeling paint, the property’s grand character is still discernible. “It was a beautiful house,” says Takis.
Takis has shown me the way here from Hydra’s port, ten minutes up a steep cobbled path passing donkeys on the way down. I’d wanted to see the house because for many years it had a notable owner: Alexis Mardas, who in the later 1960s was known for his association with the Beatles. Mardas – dubbed ‘Magic Alex’ by John Lennon for his supposed technological wizardry – seemed to come from nowhere to join the Beatles’ inner circle as they reached their psychedelic pomp: he was with them on the Magical Mystery Tour bus, in India, at the live satellite broadcast of ‘All You Need Is Love’. He also became an official employee, overseeing the electronics division of their company, Apple – with ambitions of creating mind-blowing inventions and a new state-of-the-art studio. For all this, his role in their story doesn’t yet feel fully understood.
Magic Alex is also at the heart of the various mysteries surrounding the group’s attempt to buy a Greek island in 1967. Those still-unanswered questions include the names for places that don’t exist on maps, and Mardas’ alleged connections to Greece’s military dictatorship that led to the Beatles unwittingly being “used… as propaganda” for the regime. The financial aspects of the island plans – including Mardas’ claim that the proposed investment could help save the group tax – also remain unclear. Without Magic Alex’s efforts, these intriguing puzzles would probably not exist. But who was he, and why was he so apparently influential? I hoped coming to Hydra might provide some answers.