Ioan Petru Culianu

Ioan Petru Culianu or Couliano (January 5, 1950, Iaşi – May 21, 1991, Chicago) was a Romanian historian of religion, culture, and ideas, a philosopher and political essayist, and a short story writer, and an expert in gnosticism and Medieval magic. He long served as professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, and also taught the history of Romanian culture at the University of Groningen.

Culianu was born in Iaşi. He studied at the University of Bucharest, then traveled to Italy where he was granted political asylum while attending lectures in Perugia in July 1972. He later graduated from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. He lived briefly in France and the Netherlands, before leaving Europe for Chicago, in the United States. There, after a stint as visiting professor, he became a professor at the University of Chicago. He took a Ph.D. at the University of Paris IV in January 1987, with the thesis "Recherches sur les dualismes d'Occident. Analyse de leurs principaux mythes" ("Research into Western Dualisms. An Analysis of their Major Myths"), coordinated by Michel Meslin.

Having completed three doctorates and being proficient in six languages, Culianu specialized in Renaissance magic and mysticism. He became a friend, and later the literary executor, of Mircea Eliade, the famous historian of religions. He also wrote fiction and political articles.

Minutes after concluding a conversation with one of his doctoral students, at noon on a day when the building was teeming with visitors to a book sale, Culianu was murdered in the bathroom of the divinity school, Swift Hall, of the University of Chicago. He was shot once in the back of the head. The identity of the killer and the motive are still unknown. Speculation arose that he had been killed by former Securitate agents, due to political articles in which he attacked the Communist regime. The murder occurred a year and a half after the Romanian Revolution and Nicolae Ceauşescu's death. Ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist involvement, as part of an Iron Guard revival in connection on the nationalist discourse of the late years of Ceauşescu's rule and the rise of the Vatra Românească and România Mare parties, was not itself excluded from the scenario; according to Vladimir Tismăneanu: "[Culianu] gave the most devastating indictment of the new union of far left and far right in Romania". As part of his criticism of the Iron Guard, Culianu had come to expose Mircea Eliade's connections with the latter movement during the interwar years (because of this, relations between the two academics had soured for the final years of Eliade's life). The FBI also investigated the possibility of an occult group having been involved in the killing, owing to Culianu's work in that field.

An erudite with a special interest in the occult, parallel universes and the construction of the real, Professor Ioan Culianu shared with his mentor Mircea Eliade the capacity for overarching works in the history of religions. Unlike Eliade however, Culianu's love of academia combined with unrestrained political views about Romanians and their 20th century history. "He castigated not only Securitate but the Iron Guard, cultist nationalism, the Orthodox Church, and Romanian culture. He called for investigation of Romania's genocide of Jews. Any one of these could provoke reprisal in a country that has never confronted its recent past".

Adapted after Wikipedia and other minor sources.

Dimitrie Cantemir

Dimitrie Cantemir (October 26, 1673 – August 21, 1723) was twice ruling Prince of Moldavia (in March-April 1693 and in 1710–1711). He was also a prolific man of letters – philosopher, historian, composer, musicologist, linguist, ethnographer, and geographer. His name is spelled Dimitrie Cantemir in Romanian, Dmitri Konstantinovich Kantemir in Russian, Dimitri Kantemiroğlu in Turkish, Dymitr Kantemir in Polish and Demetre Cantemir in several other languages.


Born in Silişteni (renamed Dimitrie Cantemir and now located in Vaslui County, Romania), Dimitrie was the son of Moldavian Voivode Constantin Cantemir (and brother to Antioh Cantemir, himself Prince), of the low-ranking boyar Cantemireşti family. His mother, Ana Bantăş, was a learned woman of noble origins. (Cantemir never forgot his paternal ancestry, but while in Constantinople because of his name similarity locals inspired him to pretended to descend from Khan Temir, an early 17th century khan of the Budjak Tatars). His education began at home, where he learned Greek and Latin and acquired a profound knowledge of the classics. Between 1687 and 1710 he lived in forced exile in Istanbul, where he learned Turkish and studied the history of the Ottoman Empire at the Patriarchate's Greek Academy, where he also composed music.


In 1693, he succeeded his father as Prince of Moldavia – in name only, as the Ottomans appointed Constantin Duca, favoured by Wallachian Prince and, despite many shared goals, forever rival of the Cantemirs Constantin Brâncoveanu; his bid for the throne was successful only in 1710, after two rules by his brother (whom he represented as envoy in the Ottoman capital). He had ruled only for less than a year when he joined Peter the Great in his campaign against the Ottoman Empire and placed Moldavia under Russian suzerainty, after a secret agreement signed in Lutsk. Defeated by the Turks in the battle of Stănileşti (July 18–July 22, 1711), Cantemir sought refuge in Russia, where he and his family finally settled (he was accompanied by a sizeable boyar retinue, including the chronicler Ioan Neculce). There, he was awarded the title of Knyaz (Prince) of the Russian Empire by Peter the Great and received the title of Reichsfürst (Prince) of the Holy Roman Empire from Charles VI. He died at his Dmitrovka estate near Oryol in 1723 (on the very day he was awarded the Roman-German princely title). In 1935, his remains were carried to Iaşi.


In 1714 Cantemir became a member of the Royal Academy of Berlin. Between 1711 and 1719 he wrote his most important creations. Cantemir was known as one of the greatest linguists of his time, speaking and writing eleven languages, and being well versed in Oriental scholarship. His oeuvre is voluminous, diverse, and original; although some of his scientific writings contain unconfirmed theories and inaccuracies, his expertise, sagacity, and groundbreaking researches are widely acknowledged. The best known is his History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire. This volume circulated throughout Europe in manuscript for a number of years. It was finally printed in 1734 in London, and later it was translated and printed in Germany and France. It remained the seminal work on the Ottoman Empire up to the middle of the 19th century – notably, it was used as reference by Edward Gibbon for his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Afterwards, the work was largely contested, for some of its sources were doubtful.


In 1714, at the request of the Royal Academy in Berlin, Cantemir wrote the first geographical, ethnographical and economic description of Moldavia, Descriptio Moldaviae. As many of his books it circulated first in manuscript and was only later published in Germany (first in 1769 in a geographical magazine, and then in 1771 the first edition as a book). Around the same time he prepared a manuscript map of Moldavia, the first real map of the country. It contained a lot of geographical detail as well as administrative information. Printed in 1737 in the Netherlands, it has been used by all cartographers of the time as an inspiration for their own maps of Moldavia. Other writings: the first critical history of Romania as a whole, under the name of Hronicul vechimii a romano-moldo-valahilor – aprox. "Chronicle of the durability of Romans-Moldavians-Wallachians" (1719–1722); the first Romanian language novel, the cryptic Historia Hieroglyphica (1705), to which he furnished a key, and in which the principal persons are represented by mythological beasts; A philosophical treatise, written in Romanian and also in Greek, translated into Arabic, under the title Divanul sau Gâlceava Înţeleptului cu lumea sau Giudeţul sufletului cu trupul (Iaşi, 1698) ("The Divan or The Wise Man's Parley with the World or The Judgement of the Soul with the Body"); an introduction to Islam written for Europeans, and a biography of Jan Baptist van Helmont. Due to his many esteemed works he won great renown at the high courts of Europe. His name is among those who were considered to be the brightest minds of the world on a plaque at the Library of Sainte-Genevieve in Paris, next to those of Leibnitz, Newton, Piron, and other great thinkers.

Nicolae Iorga

Nicolae Iorga (January 17, 1871, Botoşani – November 27, 1940, Strejnic, Prahova County), monumental personality of the Romanian culture, gifted with an extraordinary memory, the greatest polygraph of Romania (around 1250 published volumes and 25,000 articles), historian, university professor, literary critic, memorialist, playwright, poet, and politician.


During the primary school and the gymnasium he astonished his teachers. He finished the National Highschool in Iaşi (1888); then attended University of Iaşi (notably studying under A. D. Xenopol), where he graduated Magna Cum Laude after completing his undergraduate studies in a single year. He went on to study in Paris, Berlin, and Leipzig, obtaining his doctorate in 1893 and at 23 became at a correspondent member of the Romanian Academy (and full member in 1911). He traveled extensively throughout Europe, and his written works in many languages bear out the claim that he could read, write, and speak virtually all of the major modern European languages.


From 1902 to 1906 he was the editor of the nationalist Sămănătorul review, moving on in 1906 to found the newspaper Neamul românesc. For the rest of his life, even while serving in Parliament or as a minister, he was a daily contributor to that paper. As part of a group of professors, physicians, soldiers, etc., he helped bring Scouting to Romania. Iorga's scientific activities partly reflect his lifelong beliefs. As a moderate nationalist and an advocate of peasant traditionalism, Iorga became interested in tracing the history of the rural domains in old Wallachia and Moldavia. Thus, faced with the lack of sources related to Romanian events during the Dark Ages, and attempting to depict the process of transition from Roman Dacia to a Romance-speaking people (see Origin of Romanians), Iorga directed his efforts towards investigating the preservation of Roman customs by the peasantry. He spoke of peasant polities that would have survived to the Middle Ages, giving them the working title of Romanii populare (roughly: "People's Roman-like polities"). Iorga claimed that the Romanii would have served as the basis for relations between Hospodars (deemed peasant-voivodes) and the people (a development that was meant to cut off the medieval states from foreign influences). However, Iorga was by no means an advocate of Romanian preeminence and absolute originality. He was an internationally-acclaimed byzantinist (and the very first one in Romania), connecting the Romanian space with the Byzantine Empire and the Southeastern European sphere in general. His work Byzantium after Byzantium (1935) deals with the strong links established between the Empire and the two principalities in today's Romania. It depicts the developments after the Fall of Constantinople (1453), with the hospodars assuming the role of protectors of Eastern Orthodoxy (notably, by becoming the main patrons of Mount Athos), the perpetuation of Byzantine ceremonial customs, and the massive immigration of Byzantine clerks and intellectuals. Iorga moved away from the negative view most Romanian historians had taken of the Phanariotes.


He served as a member of Parliament, as President of the post-World War I National Assembly, as minister, and (1931-32) as Prime Minister. He was co-founder (in 1910) of the Democratic Nationalist Party. On November 27, 1940, Iorga was assassinated by a group of Iron Guard commandos, hours after the Jilava Massacre. The Iron Guard considered Iorga responsible for the 1938 death of their charismatic leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. A group of legionnaire commandos from Bucharest took him from his house to the Strejnicu forest near Bucharest, tortured him, shot him in the back, stuffed a copy of the September 9 Neamul românesc in his mouth, desecrated his body, and left it by the side of a road.