Transylvanian Honeymoon has a bit of an adventure mixed in, not just a trip abroad. It also has trains. Somehow a trip to Biztritz in the 1880s without a train just can’t be done. Well, unless you’ve never read Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But if you haven’t read that book, then the whole attraction of Biztritz is lost anyway.

The opening part with Kristoph reaching out and looking at the minds of the humans around him, echoes the very thing his son, Chrístõ, does in the first episode of Theta Sigma when he stands on the roof of his London home and reaches out across the city. That, in turn, was inspired by, of all people, Arthur Dent doing the very same in the Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy story, So Long and Thanks For All The Fish. It always struck me that in the midst of an uproariously funny series of books there is that one golden moment of utter seriousness and science fiction joy when Arthur does that, and I wanted it to form a part of my more serious story arcs as an ability that Time Lords have.

The elopement of Jeneca and Gheorghe, because they are of opposite faiths and their respectable fathers object to their union is, I think, something perfectly likely in that period of Eastern European history. Catholicism was still the predominant religion, although Lutheranism was common in the middle and upper classes. Referencing Bram Stoker, of course, Jonathan Harker is a Protestant who takes comfort in the crucifix a peasant woman gives him, and later, he and Mina are married according to the Eastern Orthodox version of Catholicism because he wants their union formalised before he is well enough to travel home to England. The idea that two young people defying the sectarian divide would need to escape from Biztritz to a big city like Bucharest is easy to imagine.

I was surprised to find that in 1881 there wasn’t a hotel called the Golden Krone. The idea that one was built not long after to accommodate tourists who followed the Dracula trail is rather amusing. Sadly, of course, Rumania has not really been a tourist spot for much of the latter half of the twentieth century. And that was recognised in the last part of the story, when Kristoph and Marion round off their honeymoon by giving a long weekend to the efforts to relieve suffering in those orphanages. Remember, of course, that in Marion’s timeline it is only the early 1990s when that was a very immediate issue.

Incidentally, the Rumanian version of the city is Bistrita, but I think it is known in the west as Biztriz.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bistri%C5%A3a
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romania
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transylvania
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucharest