Stamatis Voulgaris | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1774 |
| Died | 1842 |
| Nationality | French |
| Education | Collège des Quatre-Nations Atelier of Jacques-Louis David |
| Occupation(s) | Military officer Urbanist Architect Painter |
| Known for | Morea expedition (1828) First urban plan of the city ofPatras,Greece (1829) |
| Title | Lieutenant colonel of the French Army |
| Honours | Knight of the Legion of Honour Knight of the Order of Saint Louis |
Stamatis Voulgaris orStamati Bulgari (Greek:Σταμάτης Βούλγαρης), was a Greek painter, architect and the firsturban planner of modern Greece. He was born inLefkimmi in the island ofCorfu,Venetian Ionian Islands in 1774, and died in 1842. He was also an officer in the French army and had been also granted French nationality.[1]
Stamatis Voulgaris was born inLefkimmi, on the island ofCorfu in theIonian Islands (then aVenetian possession), in 1774. His parents were Alexandros Voulgaris of Aloysios and Loukia Pandis. From the age of seven, he attended school at St. Justine's monastery in Garitsa, where he learned his first letters. There, he was a classmate ofIoannis Kapodistrias, the future governor of Greece. An interesting incident led him to his decision to become an urban planner. During theRussian-Turkish siege of 1798–1799, while in the vicinity of theSan Giacomo theater in Corfu, a cannon ball fired from a Russian vessel fell beside young Voulgaris without immediately exploding. He immediately grabbed the fuse and then neutralized it, thus saving the theater and a whole French military detachment which passed nearby with heavy weapons and ammunition. French GeneralLouis François Jean Chabot, a friend ofNapoleon, to honor his bravery, enlisted him in the French army.[2] When the French left, the young man followed them to Paris, where he studiedurban planning in a military academy.
In 1808, he was appointed lieutenant of the Engineers. At the same time, he studied at theCollège des Quatre-Nations (which now houses the headquarters of theInstitut de France). He became an engineer geographer and an extraordinary designer in the service of the ministry'sDépôt de la Guerre (a depository of maps and archives). He participated in several military missions, notably between 1810 and 1814, as an employee at the General Staff of the governor of the Ionian Islands (now againunder French rule), GeneralFrançois-Xavier Donzelot. After the French surrendered the Islands in 1814, he was arrested by the English and imprisoned inMalta. When he was released, he undertook a new special mission inEpirus andAlbania, then was recalled to France to fight at theBattle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815. After Napoleon's defeat, he was removed from the army by theBourbon Restoration, then was reinstated and raised to the rank ofcaptain of the General Staff. On 30 January 1817, he was officially naturalized as a French citizen by order ofKing Louis XVIII.[3]
Voulgaris followed several painting courses in parallel with his studies,[4] in particular in the atelier of the renown painterJacques-Louis David.[2] He then became part, with his fellow student, the famous painterJean-Baptiste Camille Corot, of the first members of a whole new generation of youngneo-classical painters from the 1820s, in David's suite, later called theSchool of Barbizon.[5][6] This colony oflandscape artists (called the "open airists"), grouping painters such asCharles-François Daubigny,Théodore Rousseau,Jean-François Millet orGustave Courbet, were coming together a few kilometers from Paris to work in theforest of Fontainebleau which was for them a source of inspiration.
Voulgaris and Corot thus lived together in the village ofChailly-en-Bière from July 1821. Corot drew several portraits of Voulgaris, "in his bed" or "sitting in front of his easel" (he wrote at the bottom of the latter with a graphite stylus: "Stamati Bulgari in rage with reason"). Voulgaris also painted in 1821, in hisSouvenirs (published in 1835),[7] a literary painting of this forest of Fontainebleau which used to inspire him with a "meditative and religious feeling". This description is considered to be the very first known of this colony of artists.[8]
In 1823 he fought in the 3rd Corps of the Pyrenees Army during theSpanish military expedition led by France against the Spanish liberals to restoreKing Ferdinand VII of Spain to his throne. On the occasion of this campaign, he wrote two chapters in hisSouvenirs from theAlhambra Palace inGranada.[7] In December 1825, he requested to be attached to the staff of Lieutenant-General Henri Baudrand to accompany him for an inspection of the engineering service inFrench Guiana, inBarbados and inMartinique, where he met again General Donzelot (the former governor of the Ionian Islands), now governor of the island. Voulgaris twice suffered fromtropical fever. He returned to France in August 1826 and devoted a chapter of hisSouvenirs to this journey.[7][9]
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Since 1821, theGreek War of Independence was raging in Greece, which had not left Voulgaris indifferent: in 1825 he wrote in hisSouvenirs: "Grecs, aux armes! aux armes!",[7] after learning ofLord Byron's death atMissolonghi. In October 1827, Ioannis Kapodistrias, recently elected as the first governor of independent Greece, went to Paris to ask the French government for advisers and French army officers to organise the army of thenew Greek state. On the recommendation of the French Ministry of War, Voulgaris and three other officers (the captains of artilleryJean-Henri-Pierre-Augustin Pauzié, of thetopographic servicePierre Peytier, and of the engineersAuguste-Théodore Garnot) were sent to Greece in 1828 to train young Greek military engineers.[10] They were all four attached to the general staff ofGeneral Maison, commander-in-chief of theMorea military expedition, whose mission was to liberate the Peloponnese from the Turkish-Egyptian occupation troops ofIbrahim Pasha. The artillery captain Pauzié founded the Artillery School (Σχoλή Πυρoβoλικoύ) and then theCentral Military Academy of the Evelpides (Κεντρική Στρατιωτική Σχολή Ευελπίδων) in 1828 on the model of the FrenchÉcole Polytechnique.[11] Captain Peytier drew the first modernmap of the Peloponnese.
Kapodistrias appreciated the expertise of Voulgaris. The two men met first in Italy inAncona, and then embarked together aboard the frigateHMSWarspite forNafplio in Greece, where they arrived on 7 January 1828. Kapodistrias asked Voulgaris to conduct a study on the search for a suitable location in the city to build a colony for war refugees. Allocation of other urban plans followed, such as the urban planning of the cities of Nafplio (historic center and suburb of Prónoia),Tripoli,Pylos andArgos, in collaboration with Captain Garnot.[9][12][13]
Yet, the most important urban planning mission of Voulgaris was the planning of the city ofPatras in 1829, on Kapodistrias' order.[7][13] He arrived there on 5 December 1828 accompanied by Captain Auguste-Théodore Garnot.[12] The Turkish-Egyptian troops of Ibrahim Pasha had left only ruins in Patras. They had destroyed the houses, burned the gardens, uprooted all the trees and demolished the ramparts of the city fortress.[12] Voulgaris specifically proposed to erect the modern city on the seaside, which was then a freer and more extensive area. The city, with a geometric composition, took the form of a large parallelogram bordering the coastal area and of a second ending at the periphery of the old town. Seventeen vertical and wide uphill streets intersected, at right angles, eight other horizontal streets, thus dividing the city into a hundred large blocks of buildings.[14] He also planned to build nine symmetrical public squares, quays, vast and long boulevards or avenues bordered by trees and perfectly ventilated, fountains, arcades, green areas round thePatras Castle and three main doors which would open on the roads toGastouni,Kalavryta and Corinth.[12] Voulgaris also wanted to cover out of his own pocket the financial costs for tree planting in Patras.[14]
However, the original plan was not fully implemented, because on the one hand thekodjabashis (notables and primates) and the local property owners put Governor Kapodistrias under pressure to prevent any change, and on the other hand state finances were not sufficient to achieve Voulgaris' visionary plan: in 1830, the 5 symmetrical squares he had designed in the parallelogram bordering the coastal area were reduced to 2 only, including the central square dedicated to democracy (currentlyVasileos Georgiou I Square) and concord (currentlyVasilissis Olgas Square).
After handing over the city's plans to Governor Kapodistrias, Voulgaris joined the troops of the regular Greek army, then commanded by the governor's brother,Augustinos Kapodistrias, commander-in-chief forContinental Greece. Captain Voulgaris was responsible in particular for drawing the plan of the siege ofLepanto (Nafpaktos) and the direction of its works.[7] In April 1829 the siege ended and the city was taken over from the Turks. Voulgaris indicated in hisSouvenirs that "this important conquest brought that of Missolonghi (in May), where ended, with this Greek expedition, my military career."[7]
In August 1830, Voulgaris, sick, returned to France and was raised in 1831 to the rank ofchef de bataillon. In 1838, he retired to his native Corfu, in the village of Potamos nearLefkimmi, where he died in 1842. In his will, he left money to various friends and relatives, and, moreover, to the French Consulate to distribute to the French indigents of Corfu.[15]
