Fernand Courby
| Fernand Courby | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
Fernand Henri Fabien Courby 19 January 1878 Bourg-lès-Valence |
| Died | 6 March 1932 (aged 54) Lyon |
| Occupation | Archaeologist Hellenist |
Fernand Henri Fabien Courby (19 January 1878 – 6 March 1932) was a French archaeologist and Hellenist, a specialist of ancient Greece, a member of the French School at Athens (class 1905), and professor at the Faculté des lettres of the University of Lyon.
Born into a modest family of Valence in the Drôme department where his father ran a machine shop, Fernand Courby experienced from childhood the taste to translate through drawing the expression of his thought. A brilliant student in high school in Valence, then a scholarship holder for license and aggregation at the Faculty of Arts of Lyon, he was formed by the teaching of Henri Lechat Maurice Holleaux and Philippe-Ernest Legrand and chosen to be a member of the French School at Athens in 1905.
After a stay at the Académie de France in Rome (Villa Medici), he joined the great archaeological sites of Delos and Delphi under the leadership of Maurice Holleaux. An archaeologist coupled with a designer and very expert in architecture, he realized the then so rare type of archaeologist-architect that was missing in the French School at Athens, and contributed to a capital change in French methods in archeology.
At Delos, he became interested in 1906 in the proto-history of the sanctuary, unearthed the Portico Antigone with one of the tombs of the Hyperborean Virgins (the Theke), and discovered the remains of a Minoan and Mycenaean Delos in the sanctuary of Apollo and Artemis. With Charles Picard, he prepared the enhancement of the excavations of the city and the Temple of Zeus by a mission to Stratos (Acarnania). At Delphi, his studies on the tholos of the Sicycone Treasury, the east pediment of the archaic temple on the nearby monument of the opisthodomos, and especially the terrace of the temple renewed the knowledge of Delphic monuments.
Mobilized in 1914 and assigned in 1915 to the 176th Infantry Regiment, it was in the uniform of an adjutant (and under the Turkish balls) that he participated in the development of Macedonia excavations, especially the necropolis of Elaeusin in Thrace, unearthed during work entrenchment in the Dardanelles in early June 1915. He cumulated these archaeological activities with the function of officer-interpreter by the 2nd office of the General Staff of the Armies of the East in Salonika. His role in the development of the victorious offensive which forced Bulgaria to ask for an armistice September 29, 1918 earned him the Greek Medal of Military Merit and the French Croix de Guerre with citation to the order of the Eastern Army.
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