After Life Devoted to Study of Death, Greek Professor Abruptly Vanishes

Each step was meticulously plotted: credit cards left for his wife, letters for friends, car keys placed where they could be found in his BMW. He even filled the gas tank and left money for tolls.

Then the professor who was drawn to the study of death, who struggled with mortality and meaning in eight books, simply vanished.

In the thick forests and sun-bleached crags towering above his home village near the southern city of Sparta, no trace of Dimitri Liandinis has been found.

Still, the trail points just one way. His solo trek into the mountains in early June was the culmination of a career obsessed by the interplay of life and death.

Don’t fear the end, he often told his philosophy students at the University of Athens. Embrace it, understand it. Death, he said, bestows context and texture to life.

Although he lectured and wrote tirelessly, there was one topic he kept tucked away from almost everyone. It was the evolution of a personal doctrine about death, about a ritualistic, symbolic termination of life, cheating age and illness.

A dominant inspiration was a 5th century B.C. Greek philosopher, Empedocles. Legend says he threw himself into a crater on the Mt. Etna volcano on Sicily when he was 56 years old--the same age as Liandinis when he vanished.

The professor could be dismissed as a misguided intellectual with a death wish. In Greece, however, such passion draws its share of admirers.

“Don’t say suicide,” urged Liandinis’ wife, Nicolitsa, also a university professor. “Suicide doesn’t count here. My husband was a rare creation.”

But not unique in Greece.

Few heirs of the ancient Western world identify with their patrimony as closely as the Greeks.

For four centuries of Ottoman rule, which ended with independence in the 1820s, Greeks were kept from honoring their ancient civilization, which was preserved and studied elsewhere in Europe. Once free, Greeks eagerly embraced this legacy, and it helped unify the young nation divided by feuding clans and a Babel of dialects.

Now, Greece is infused with its once-forgotten heritage.

Liandinis studied the ancients but also the modern ethnocentric creeds of writers such as Pericles Yiannopoulos, who contended that the Greek aesthetic was innately superior to all others.

Yiannopoulos, who became a hero among ultra-nationalists, garlanded a horse with roses and rode into the sea outside Athens in April 1910. When the water reached his knees, he killed himself with a gunshot to the head.

Now the professor’s apparent suicide was being debated at a cafe in Sparta by a group of laborers. They commiserated with his wife. But they all lauded Liandinis as a man of unwavering conviction--of pathos, or passion. This, to them, was his birthright as a Greek.

“To Greece. To pathos,” toasted Costas Theocopoulos, a road worker, raising a glass of white wine.

Death was Liandinis’ intellectual companion.

He wrote eight books, each in some way exploring the Greek character and the inevitability of dying. Increasingly, he returned to the concept that ancient Greeks idealized death before age sapped beauty and creativity.

“He thought that every righteous person, himself included, should have a nice death,” his wife said. “Death in old age was always something horrifying to him.”

But he wasn’t morose about it. Colleagues and former students described him as an affable man with a sharp intellect. He loved to ski, swim and scan the stars with his telescope.

When Liandinis spoke about his theories of confronting death, his wife considered it just part of her husband’s deeply introspective nature.

“He made me believe it was on a philosophical level, an imaginative level. . . . I thought he used it as a medium of expression. I could never imagine he would actually do it,” said Nicolitsa Liandinis in their Athens home, awash in the tide of Liandinis’ research: books, manuscripts, papers. Liandinis never learned to use a computer and wrote everything in a tight, precise script.

On May 31, Liandinis returned home after spending several days in and around Sparta. He visited his 90-year-old mother and called on old friends. He walked through the hills around his tiny village-- several homes on a dirt road shaded by sweet-smelling eucalyptus trees.

In the middle of the night, Nicolitsa Liandinis said she awoke from a dream in which shadows closed around her husband. Liandinis kissed her. “You’re Caesar’s wife,” he said, referring to a tale about her premonition of Caesar’s murder.

When Nicolitsa Liandinis returned home from the university on June 1, she walked from room to room gathering the pieces left by her husband. There was a two-page letter to their daughter, Diotima, that began: “I leave willingly. . . . I have been preparing for this my entire life, which has been, above all, a careful study of death.”

On the couch, a book was open to a page about Caesar’s wife. Personal items--credit cards, money, reading glasses--were laid out on a table. On the night stand was a copy of a philosophy book, “A Life Entombed,” in which Liandinis wrote a line dated May 31: “Tomorrow, well, tomorrow is the big day.”

On June 3, his car was found in Sparta parked in front of the library. It was full of gas, and the window was left open enough to unlock the door without smashing the glass. There were postal receipts for letters to friends.

Toll money was left, and the keys were covered by a copy of Liandinis’ latest book, “Gemma,” a collection of musings about mortality. In one passage, Liandinis described Empedocles’ leap as “one of the most human acts ever carried out.” The text also carries several references to the Taygetos mountain chain, which comes to a pinnacle 8,141 feet above the plain of Sparta.

Liandinis took a taxi to a mountaineers’ shelter at the base of the peak, police said. He has not been seen since.

The alpine search was scaled back after a few days. Eventually, the professor’s mother asked that it be called off. She said her son’s body should not be disturbed.

“He tried to live his death,” said his wife. “He wanted, in some way that only he understood, to beat death.”