Vutye, Olivier

Vutier was born in 1796 in the French city of Tuar , in the family of a naval officer. At the age of 15 he entered the naval school in Brest .

In April 1820, at the age of twenty-three, he was an ensign on the French naval schooner “Estafette”, which settled on the island of Milos in the Aegean Sea, which was still Ottoman at that time. Fascinated by the history and art of ancient Greece, Vutier did not escape the temptation to engage in profitable “black” archeology, which became popular in those years. Climbing ashore with two sailors, Vut'e began excavations in the ruins of the ancient city. The French managed to find several pieces of marble sculptures. But Vutier immediately appreciated the find of the local peasant Georgy Ketrotas, who also dug a few dozen meters from them. The French consulate in Athens and the embassy in Constantinople were involved in order to buy and transfer to France the statue of the goddess Aphrodite (Venus) found by a peasant. So a few months before the start of the Liberation War of the Greeks, the statue of Venus de Milo ended up in France where it remains today in the Louvre ^{[1] [2] [3]} .

In 1821, with the beginning of the Greek Revolution, Voutier left the French fleet and went to Greece, where he arrived in September 1821, along with the Scottish officer and Philwellian Thomas Gordon .

By order of Dmitry Ypsilanti in April 1822, the first regiment (in fact, the battalion) of the regular army from the Greeks abroad and foreign volunteers began to form. The first commander was born in Crete Corsican Balest, Joseph . After Balest was sent to Crete, where he died, Italian Tarella, Pietro, took command of the regiment. Vutier was charged with command of artillery (2-3 guns). In this position and in the rank of Lieutenant Colonel Vutier, he took part in the Battle of Peta , where the regiment lost half of its composition, including its commander ^[4] . After the command of the regular regiment took Favier, Charles Nicolas , Vutier was again appointed commander of artillery in the rank of a thousandth ^[5] .

In 1823, Voutier returned to France, where he published his Greek memoirs, which were also twice published in Germany.

Vutier again arrived in Greece in 1824 and finally in 1826.

After the re-establishment of the Greek state of Vutje, it was mentioned in 1841 by a colonel on the island of Syros , ready to go to Crete to help the rebels ^[6] .

Vutier has written two books:

• “Mémoires du colonel Voutier sur la guerre actuelle des Grecs” (Paris, 1823) , in Greek (Απομνημοονέυματα, 57θήνα 1957).

Russian translation: Colonel Vut'e’s notes on the current war of the Greeks ... SPb., 1824–1825. (Translation of Orest Somov )

Part 1. 1824.

Part 2. 1825.

• “Lettres sur la Grece, notes et chants populaires” (Letters to Greece, notes and folk songs — Paris, 1826) ^[7] .

Vutier is also the author of drawings from life and portraits of prominent personalities of the war, which are often used as illustrations by Greek historians in their studies ^[8] . Greek historians consider the French officer and Phillyn Reibault, Maxim, the most authentic of all the French memoirs and historians of the first years of the revolution. It was Raybaud who, frankly, ironically and condemns Voutier, who in his "Memoires sur la guerre actuelle des Grecs" claimed that he was a hero of (fictional) feats during the Greek expedition to Epirus and witnessed events such as taking Tripoli while taking which however he was not there It was. However, Woutier influenced Raybaud in the form and idea of ​​his memoirs ^[9] . Raybaud published his memoirs a year after Vutier, in 1824, in which, among other things, Vutier’s fiction could be traced. After the first return of Vutier to Greece in 1824, Mavrokordato, Alexander asked Vutier for a copy of the book. In the book he received there were many torn pages, which is why Mavrokordato noted that there could not be more lies in the torn pages than in the rest. According to the modern British historian William St. Clair, as a result of Raybaud’s irony and hostility towards Woutiers, after the latter’s second return to Greece in 1826, a duel took place between the two French. Both Vutier and Raybaud were injured in a duel, Raybaud more severe ^[10]

Having retired, Vut'e settled in 1847 in the city of Hyères (Var) . Here in 1820, after his participation in sending a sculpture of Venus de Milo to France, he bought a piece of land on one of the hills surrounding the city. Here he built a villa called Castel Sainte-Claire ( Castel St. Clair ). After his death on April 18, 1877, Voutier was buried in the park of the villa Castel Sainte-Claire.