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Remembering Home
Home does not begin with us.
Long before we arrive, other people have lived in these places, cooked at these fires, told stories about the landscape, celebrated the turning seasons, buried their dead, raised their children, and tried to make sense of the world around them.
Echoes of the Hearth is the historical and folkloric branch of Mistress of the Hearth. It is a place for exploring the stories, beliefs, traditions, and ordinary lives that shape our understanding of where we come from and the places we inhabit now.
History is not only what survives in archives and museums. It lives in recipes and family stories, village legends and household customs, old buildings and altered landscapes, and in traditions repeated long after anyone remembers exactly why they began.
Remembering does not mean preserving everything we inherit unchanged. It means understanding what came before us well enough to recognize what has shaped us, question what deserves questioning, and decide what is worth carrying forward.
Research & Writing
I have always been drawn to the places where history refuses to stay neatly in the past.
The old story someone still tells about a village. The recipe made the same way for generations. A superstition nobody quite believes anymore but follows anyway. The marks left on a building, the traditions that survived while others disappeared, and the uncomfortable histories hiding beneath stories we have learned to romanticize.
These are the echoes I am interested in.
My work explores history, folklore, belief, and cultural memory; not simply to document what people once did, but to understand what those things tell us about the people who came before us and the worlds they were trying to make sense of. I am especially interested in the complicated places where belief can offer meaning, resilience, and belonging while also becoming a source of fear, exclusion, and harm.
My graduate research at the University of Edinburgh has focused on Spiritualism, mysticism, and witchcraft, and living in Transylvania has given me an extraordinary new landscape in which to keep asking those questions. Here, folklore is not difficult to find. It lives alongside village traditions and family stories, in old houses and churches, in food and seasonal customs, and in the stories attached to mountains, forests, ruins, and the people who once inhabited them.
Echoes of the Hearth is where I follow those threads, through my research and writing, through archives and landscapes, and sometimes simply by listening carefully when someone tells me a story they learned from their grandmother.
Because history is not only what happened.
It is what people remembered.
Tours & Storytelling
Some stories make more sense when you can stand where they happened.
A castle becomes different when you understand the village that grew around it. A forest path changes when you know the stories once attached to the mountains. A beautiful medieval street becomes considerably more interesting when you begin asking who actually lived there, what they feared, what they believed, and which version of their story survived.
My place-based tours turn history and folklore into experiences you can walk through.
Rather than simply moving from landmark to landmark, each route follows a story. Along the way, buildings, landscapes, objects, and overlooked details become clues to the lives and beliefs of the people who came before us.
Current experiences explore the history, folklore, and legends of Transylvania, including Sighișoara, Brașov, and the villages surrounding Bran, with new stories continuing to emerge as my research takes me deeper into the region.
These aren’t stories told from a distance.
They are invitations to step inside them.
Tutoring
History becomes much more interesting when it stops being a list of things you are supposed to remember and becomes a set of questions you are allowed to ask.
I offer private history tutoring and research guidance for students who want help making sense of those questions, whether that means understanding historical context, working with primary and secondary sources, developing an argument, organizing research, or simply learning how to approach history with greater confidence and curiosity.
My goal isn’t to hand students the “right” interpretation. It is to help them learn how to investigate, question, connect evidence, and build an interpretation they can defend.
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1 hr
50 US dollars