Saxon Painting and its Hidden Language in When Secrets Bloom

In the Carpathian lands wood was never only material. It was a way of life, forest turned into geographical landmark (Transylvania, Trans-silva, the land beyond the forest). Wood was shelter and church, and then it became memory.

With the arrival of German Saxons in Transylvania during the middle of the 12th century, the craft tradition of painted furniture started out of with necessity before it became decoration. Colours arrived later, as an afterthought to survival.

And yet it is colour that outlived so much else.

In my novels When Secrets Bloom and Beneath the Snow I draw on this medieval Saxon tradition: not as background detail, but as silent architecture beneath the lives of my characters. Because painted wood is never passive. It tells as much as it remembers.

29/05/202629/05/2026

Decoding History: Vlad Dracula’s Letters and Their Scientific Secrets

There are moments in history when the past reveals itself willingly to those who study it with patience and passion. One such arrived recently, when historical chemist researchers bent over three 500-year-old letters written by voivode Vlad III of Wallachia, the man the world remembers as Vlad the Impaler, or Vlad Drăculea, the Son of the Dragon.

25/04/202612/05/2026

Real Places in Historical Fiction: Brașov in When Secrets Bloom

Biserica Neagra Brasov si Piata Honterus in fictiune istorica

There are cities in Transylvania that do not simply sit on the map, they remember. They carry the sediment of centuries like bark around an old trunk. Brașov, know as Corona or Kronstadt in medieval times, is one of those places. In When Secrets Bloom Brașov does appear only as a backdrop. It breathes. It resists. It watches.

Because to write about a place is to write against forgetting.

Readers will discover Brașov as a setting in my story Kate’s Letter featured in our historical fiction anthology Courage: Tales of History, Mystery and Hope.

27/01/202627/01/2026

A Proven Historical Pressure Cooker: Marriage as Surveillance

In fifteenth-century Transylvania, marriage was not a private affair. It was a public instrument. A legal mechanism. A way of (finally) being seen.

25/01/202625/01/2026

If History Forgets, Who Remembers? Hidden Truths in When Secrets Bloom

We are creatures of imagination and we understand the world by telling stories about it. Before chronicles hardened into dates and rulers. Before ink fixed memory into law. Stories softened fear, explained loss, they gave shape to grief. In Transylvania, where mountains fold memory into stone and winter teaches patience, stories do not merely entertain. They endure.