The House of Fourni has been built in Delos, located 37°39143” North and 25°26947” East, in the heart of the Cyclades and off Mykonos. In ancient times it was considered a sacred island, the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, and despite its small size, it experienced exceptional urban and economic development. The House of Fourni is a vast house-complex built outside the urban centre, in an intermediate area organised around the bay of Fourni which linked the city of Delos and the countryside, dedicated to agriculture and livestock. It is built on a hillside which exploits both the granite and the natural slope, thus benefiting from a multi-level construction and a splendid view over the bay. According to the ceramics, it was built at the end of the 2nd century BC or at the very beginning of the 1st century BC, during the period of the island's demographic and economic expansion, when it was declared a tax-free port and given to Athens by the Roman Senate. Its occupation period is short, from fifty to seventy years at most, but dense and characteristic of this period of economic and cosmopolitan effervescence. Indeed, its patrons and occupants must have belonged to a particularly wealthy class of the Delian community, which derived its income from the exploitation of large landed estates and enjoyed a broad Mediterranean culture. Its topographical situation, its architectural characteristics, as well as the quality, richness and variety of its sculpted, painted and mosaic decoration represent an extraordinary – and still unpublished – example of Delian Hellenistic suburban dwellings.
Discovered in 1916, partially excavated in 1935, in the end of the 1950s, and again in the 2010s by a multidisciplinary team, this particular and quite unique Delian house has many assets to enable us to deal with global issues concerning the history of the urban development of Delos, the exploitation of its territory, as well as the cultural exchanges with Italy and Alexandria at work in its architecture, decoration, furniture and ceramics. It is also representative of the methodological and scientific evolution of archaeology over a century, as well as of the progress made in the consideration, exploitation and management of archives.
The publication project is directed by Hélène Wurmser.
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