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.

16/04/202617/04/2026

Even truth becomes blind when it refuses to look – When Secrets Bloom

Some stories are not built all at once. They gather in fragments. A line that refuses to loosen its grip. An image formed at the edge of thought. A truth that waits until it’s the right time to be released.

In When Secrets Bloom these fragments came first. This series of book quotes gathers those glimpses.

09/04/202608/04/2026

The White Wolf Ancestry of Romans, Genghis Khan, Turks, and Dacians

Rome, the Capitoline She-Wolf with Romulus and Remus, photographed by my daughter Lysandra Furstenberg

There are stories that refuse to stay in one place. They move through empires and forests, from the hills of Rome to the endless grasslands of the steppe, carried not in stone, but in memory and blood. Again and again, across distant peoples, the same figure appears: not crowned, not tamed, but wild: the wolf.

From the White Wolf and the Lupercal cave in Rome, to the wolfish-blood origin of the Mongols, the She-Wolf Asena ancestry of the Turks and, of course, to the fearless Zalmoxis and the Great White Wolf of the Dacians let’s follow the wolf.

23/03/202623/03/2026

The Unique, Medieval Church of Sântămăria Orlea, Transylvania, Romania

Church of Sântamaria Orlea, catholic, orthodox, reformed, built1270

The road curled around the valley like a silk ribbon that time itself could have dropped. And maybe it did. It was up to me to pick it up and discover where it will lead.

27/01/202627/01/2026