 Born in Athens, Ottoman Empire (present-day Greece) in 1760, he spent 47 years in India, where he translated many Hindu sacred texts into Greek and compiled a Sanskrit-English-Greek dictionary of over 9000 words.He died on 3 May 1833 in Varanasi, India.He was buried in the Catholic cemetery there, and his tombstone is inscribed with the epitaph, "ΕΙΣ ΜΝΗΜΗΝ ΔΗΜΗΤΡΙΟΥ ΓΑΛΑΝΟΥ ΤΟΥ ΑΘΗΝΑΙΟΥ" (in memory of Dimitrios Galanos the Athenian).