It happened on the tenth day of August. This year. Two months ago - more or less.
I visited one of the two supermarkets on the edge of my hometown early in the morning, and then ...
... about an hour later, around 8 AM, I stopped for about five or ten minutes in one of the narrow streets that lead from the main square in the center of the old town to my neiberhood a little less than a hundred meters further.
I stopped for two reasons.
First - I had to buy the newspapers in the small tobacco shop there, and second ...
... a small truck was blocking the way.
A small, two-person municipal maintenance crew was changing the lantern. They put away the old one and were about to finish putting a new one in the same place when I arrived.
That's all this post is about. Not much, really. Just a small slice of everyday life in Medulin, the small seaside, tourism-oriented town in which I live. A warm moment of summer, frozen in time.
The old lantern was completely different. A street lamp enveloped in a fairly large sphere made of glass. I passed by that thing thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even a million times, but I never photographed it purposely. It didn't look interesting enough, I guess.
The above picture is a crop that shows that old lamp that can't be seen on the street corner by the tobacco shop anymore. I took the original photograph on a rainy day, through the windshield of my car. I can't even say that the streetlamp was the last thing on my mind on that occasion - it wasn't on my mind at all.
Today, while preparing this post, I went on a quest to find at least one shot that shows that lamp. It took me a couple of hours of tedious exploration. No old folder was left unexplored. Fortunately, I found one photograph from the summer of 2021 that could help me, but unfortunately - it wasn't very good and it had to be cropped for the lamp to be fairly presentable.
What I wanna say is that relatively short, not particularly inspired posts like the one you are just reading, often demand more work than one might expect.
In this slightly better old photograph from the winter of 2017, you can see another old lamp of the same type. I mean, more or less of the same type. They are both glass spheres like fish bowls or cartoonish space suits helmets but there are some differences between the two. This one was mounted on the front facade of one of the old houses in the main square.
This is the new lantern. Its vintage design makes it look older than the old ones. I mean, it looks older in a neat, stylish way, not like old, rusted, and stuff like that. In the following photograph ...
... I zoomed in on the new mechanism that makes the lantern shine when the day is done.
Small towns like the one I'm living in can look a bit like places from the Twilight Zone. Even in summer, the old center is weirdly quiet because contemporary tourists don't care about it. They spend their holidays closer to the sea. The narrow streets of the old town are kinda stuck in time. That's the sensation they are evoking, anyway. A change of lanterns made the time flow again, if only for a moment.
When it comes to the newspapers I had to buy, I didn't buy them. Nope. A friend who was there with me did it ...
... so I was free to photograph the work around the new lantern with an easy, not particularly inspired post in mind.