Dimitris Koutroubis

Dimitris Koutroubis was born in Athens in 1921 and died in England (in Denver, Dawnham Market, Norfolk province) in 1983. His father, an Athenian merchant, came from Kastania in Sparta and his mother from Vavdos in Halkidiki. After finishing the Experimental School of Athens, he enrolls in the Medical School, but an accident forces him to interrupt his studies. The accident will leave him with a disability in his right leg and seal his life. During his hospitalization he became acquainted with visiting Jesuit monks, and in 1946 he joined their order as a cadet. He studied philosophy at Heythrop College, Oxford, having previously attended philosophy courses at the College de Mongré in Lyon, where he became acquainted with Père de Lybac's group, which had begun a systematic study of the theological and liturgical tradition of Orthodoxy.
In 1950 he moved to Beirut and taught at the University of St. Joseph. Seven years after he joined the Jesuit Order, having studied the Orthodox tradition in a primitive way, he returns to his native Church. In 1953 he resettled in Athens, connected with religious circles and attempted an intervention in the theological debates of the time by testifying his knowledge and experience. From 1956 he began to publish articles in religious magazines, trying to make known in Greece the theological thought of the Russian theologians of the diaspora, to underline the theology of the liturgical texts and to recall the axes of reference of the ecclesiastical ethos. Since 1964 he has been collaborating with the group of people who publish the magazine "Synoro".
He excelled mainly as a good future century debater. He had the rare gift of accepting people as familiar, leading them with discernment to great exits and conclusions, and empowering them to accomplish their work. To those who knew him, he lives on as a caring hug, a cheerful face and an empowering comfort.