Category: Traditions

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Saxon Painting and its Hidden Language in When Secrets Bloom

ornamental old chest on ground

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.

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Simmering Stories: Robbie Cheadle Reviews When Secrets Bloom and I Share a Historical Recipe

When Secrets Bloom, historical fiction set in 143 Transylvania, an old book near a pot of sarmale

Some conversations are like a shared meal: nourishing, layered with memory and meaning. When Robbie Cheadle speaks about the books she reads she does so, with generosity. With Robbie, reading and cooking meet at the same table.

In her thoughtful feature of When Secrets Bloom on Latinos USA simple pleasures take centre stage: the turning of a page, the slow preparation of food, the way both acts bind us to history and to one another.

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