Ludovic Thély

Ludovic Thély wrote the account of how the French School at Athens came to excavate Amathus. His article "La naissance de la mission de l'École française d'Athènes à Amathonte (1969-1975)" appeared in Cahiers du Centre d'Etudes Chypriotes 44 (2014), pp. 53-73, and rests on the archives of the School and of the French Foreign Ministry¹. He also wrote the introduction to the same issue², and signed it as a member of the École française d'Athènes¹.

The story he tells begins in October 1969, when Vassos Karageorghis, Director of the Department of Antiquities, wrote to Pierre Amandry, newly Director of the School, after a Franco-Cypriot cultural agreement had been signed, and began to press for the cession of excavation rights at Amathus¹. Thély describes the correspondence of Amandry with Polys Modinos, the first Cypriot ambassador in Paris and, through marriage, Amandry's uncle, as part of the background¹. Amandry at first declined and tried to place the work under the French institute at Beirut; Thély quotes his letter to Ernest Will saying that Karageorghis "ne s'est pas tenu pour battu"¹. The first large team received Amathus in the opening days of April 1975. He describes the loss of the French concessions at Salamis, Enkomi and Cape Saint-André in the war of 1974 as decisive for the outcome, while noting that the discussions had begun in 1969¹.

The issue records a colloquium on the Cypriot kingdoms, held at the Maison de Chypre in Athens on 20 and 21 March 2015 and organised by the School under the responsibility of Anna Cannavò and Thély, and an exhibition of nearly 150 digitised documents¹. The two edited the proceedings as BCH Supplément 60 (2018), and the table of contents lists them as joint authors of its introduction^4,5. His other Cypriot article, on two attestations of Aphrodite Kypris in eastern Crete in the late Hellenistic period, appeared in Cahiers du Centre d'Etudes Chypriotes 46 (2016), pp. 323-339³.