Omicidio all'università. Mircea Eliade e il suo passato nascosto

In early 1991, Ioan Culianu, a brilliant scholar of religion and the intellectual heir to Mircea Eliade, began receiving death threats. Fearing for his life, he entrusted a colleague with some confidential documents concerning Eliade’s early years. A week later, he was murdered in the bathroom of the Divinity School. The murder case was never solved, leaving the mystery surrounding those documents unsolved. Bruce Lincoln retraces the story, highlighting how much they might reveal about Eliade’s past and his relationship with the Romanian far right. Perhaps we will never know the ultimate reasons behind Culianu’s brutal end. But it is striking how the shadow of violence, which permeated the Romanian 20th century, also enveloped the final chapter of this intellectual’s life, as he was engaged in a sort of desperate and painful quest into the early years of his mentor.