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| 20 Years since Ioan Petru Culianu’s Death |
| (2011-05-30) |
| Last updated: 2011-08-08 12:16 EET |
20 years ago, Romanian culture lost one of the most brilliant people of the 20th century. On 21 May 1991, historian of religions, fiction writer and essayist Ioan Petru Culianu was shot in the back of the head with a handgun. The incident happened in the lavatory of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. The FBI arrested two suspects, one of whom was immediately released. The second was sentenced later, but only because there existed prior warrants. At 41 years of age, Culianu left behind a vast corpus of writing in several areas, revealing great creativity, an uncommon analytical spirit and a desire to explore the edges of knowledge.
Ioan Petru Culianu was born in the NE city of Iasi, on January 5th 1950, in a family of noble extraction. His paternal great-grandfather was one of the founders of Junimea, a cultural movement with a huge influence on Conservative groups. He was a brilliant student at the School of Letters of the University of Bucharest, with a graduation paper on Italian humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Since high school, Culianu was fascinated by a great personality of Romanian culture of the 20th century, Mircea Eliade, whom he tried to copy to the letter. Upon his 1972 graduation, Culianu left Romania and settled in Italy where, alongside Ugo Bianchi of the Catholic University of Milan, he specialized in Gnosticism, early Christianity and the Renaissance. In 1976 he moved to the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, and, in 1990, to the US, where he obtained a teaching job at the Divinity School, where Mircea Eliade had taught.
The special relationship between Eliade and Culianu was a topic for study for Romanian philosopher Horia Roman Patapievici, who has written various essays on Culianu. It was a meeting of minds, a means of inner transformation: “What fascinated Culianu when dealing with Eliade was just what had fascinated Eliade when dealing with Giovanni Papini. That is, a means of utilizing culture. This is illustrated in an article that Mircea Eliade published in the Royal Foundation Review, in 1937. The title was ‘Folklore as an Instrument of Knowledge’. In essence, what it said was: all cultural fact, including the facts that became cultural relics, such as folklore, store within them a cognitive set of tools that can be used not only for knowing, but for inner transformation. In this way, one attains a cognitive set of tools allowing them access cultural or ontological areas inaccessible before that. What fascinated a young Culianu about a young Eliade was this cognitive utopia".
Culianu’s biography is that of a restless individual, in a quest for boundaries to cross. While in Italy, Culianu made acquaintances in radical circles, his Italian girlfriend being a peer of the terrorist group the Red Brigades. For a short period of time he worked as a librarian for the Iosif Constantin Dragan Foundation, named after a well-known business man, close to the Nicolae Ceausescu regime. While in a refugee camp in Italy, he had one suicide attempt. He left for the Netherlands and this was the beginning of a calmer period in his life. He wrote most of his works at the Groningen University.
After 1989, the fall of communism fully opened the Romanians’ horizons. People who had lived the bitter life of exile were now free to step in and help the reconstruction of Romania. This is how Culianu also became better known. Writer Gabriela Adamesteanu interviewed Ioan Petru Culianu in Chicago, in December 1990. This was to be his last interview.
Gabriela Adamesteanu, who at the time was touring US, told us how she flew in to Chicago from Los Angeles to talk to Culianu: ‘’It’s very hard to explain why I got back to Chicago. I met Culianu who looked unbelievably young. He was forty, but he looked as if he were in his late 20’s. I compared him to other people I’d met in exile. He seemed perfectly adapted to the world he was living in and he really looked like a personality, somebody who was carried on his shoulders an opportunity for Romanian culture. I took the interview in the restaurant where he used to go with Mircea Eliade. I still remember the music, the movements, and the light that evening.”
Ioan Petru Culianu’s death has fueled lots of rumors and scenarios. American journalist Ted Anton wrote a book about Culianu and his death, actually describing five potential scenarios: a revenge of exiled Romanian far-right activists, considering that Culianu has written texts against the Iron Guard ideology, an act masterminded by the communist political police who wanted to punish Culianu for his disclosures regarding the 1989 revolution, a student’s revenge, a drug dealers’ settling of accounts and even a scenario in which his girlfriend killed him to get insurance money. Despite all these hypotheses, more or less convincing, his death remains shrouded in mystery, 20 years on.
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