Liznjan is a village near my hometown. Just a couple of kilometers from Medulin where I live. I visit the port and the coastal areas around Liznjan almost every day but I don't walk around the village that often.
On the 22nd of March this year, I spent a couple of hours surrounded by the houses of Liznjan, and now, seven months later, I'm ready to publish a post about that experience.
In the opening photograph, you can see a family house surrounded by a nice variety of decorative and fruit-producing plants. The home belongs to a family I know very well. The man they all call Grandpa is a local fisherman and is still very active at sea.
I was there with my father, and he was there to buy a couple of kilos of fresh fish from the bay of Liznjan.
There, in the fisherman's house, my father met an old friend with whom he worked more than forty years ago. That man also came to buy fresh fish. Since they had a lot to talk about, after drinking a bit of homebrewed schnapps with them, I decided to go for a walk around the neighborhood in search of something interesting to photograph and blog about.
I passed by the fisherman's house ...
... and after photographing these succulents that were hanging on the terrace railing ...
... I started my little adventure around that neiberhood. Just about fifty meters further down the road, I stopped to photograph an old house that was being renovated. The thing that caught my attention wasn't the house itself or the construction material & machinery scattered across its yard, but a traffic sign in front of it.
Two senior citizens who looked like two shadows were walking across the flat white emptiness...
... under the huge punctuation mark that signals some kind of danger or surprise.
I have seen many things in my life, especially on the Internet and TV, but a traffic sign like this - never! Later, at home, it came to my mind that there is a fairly new nursing home in Liznjan, so this could be the reason for this unique sign that resembles a different version of those signs that can be seen in front of the schools and playgrounds.
Here you can take a good look at the backyard of that old stone house that will soon be fresh like a new one.
For this set of four photographs, I returned about twenty meters back toward the fisherman's house that started the post. Here you can see a completely new villa that reinterprets the traditional stone architecture of this area in a new way.
An abandoned old house was the next. This was a traditional and certainly pretty active homestead once. In the time when it was new, this building was situated on the outskirts of the village and now is in the middle of a relatively new neighborhood. The part shown in this photograph was a stable.
Here you can take a look at the space under the porch shown in the previous shot.
In this shot, you can see the whole homestead.
The glass of the windows was broken and the door had a big hole ...
... so I was able to take a peek at the house's interior.
This stairway and the wooden beams on the ceiling look pretty cool. I was, and still am, curious about the rooms upstairs but I didn't feel like trespassing so those will remain a mystery.
Here you can take another look at the exterior. The house was photographed from a different angle in this shot.
Some minutes later and about a hundred meters further, I was approaching an attractive new villa on the outskirts of Liznjan.
I was passing close to the building when I took this photograph.
A bit later I came across a group of bigger apartment buildings that I usually don't associate with Liznjan. Buildings of this kind are more typical for my hometown where they started sprouting like mushrooms after the autumn rain in the mid-nineties.
When it came to the building shown in the previous photograph, only one balcony showed a bit of human activity.
Here you can see another building of that relatively small complex just outside of the compact core of the village. In the following shot ...
... you can take another look at the same building. The thing was photographed from a different angle this time.
A bit further across the road, another relatively big house was under construction. This one wasn't that tall but was considerably longer than any ordinary family house closer to the center of Liznjan.
The exterior of the apartment buildings was generally painted in similar colors but when it came to the details, there was enough diversity to make this photoshoot fairly interesting.
On the way back to the village, I stopped to photograph this unfinished house. There wasn't anything special about the building shown in this photograph ...
... but I saw an orca in its yard. That's the thing that made me stop and pull the camera out of the backpack. The house shown in the previous photograph is part of the last line of buildings that form the compact part of the village. There is an area covered with shrubs and grass between it and the taller apartment buildings shown earlier.
As I walked towards the center of Liznjan ...
... the buildings around me were getting smaller.
After portraiting this family house in a wide shot that shows a bit of the surroundings as well ...
... I zoomed in on its door. Can't tell you exactly why, but the simple and not particularly original design shown in this photograph somehow caught my attention back on the 22nd of March 2023.
At some point, I passed by the same house I introduced near the beginning of the post, you know, the old one that was being renovated.
The neiberhood I'm talking about was built around an old cemetery that doesn't accept new clients anymore.
Here you can see the biggest tombstone in that little graveyard. It looks a bit like some small temple.
You can find many interesting details on the old tombstones.
Despite the absence of living souls, you can't get bored in this place if you are into art, design & history.
I can't tell you much about the small cemetery in the middle of the neiberhood. There's nothing about it on the Internet.
The engraving on this tombstone shows that the person buried there was born in 1819 and lived until 1883.
This old photograph has the power to take you traveling back in time where you can meet the ghosts of the world we left behind.
Some graves are marked with simple makeshift crosses.
The dead and the living are very close to each other in this neiberhood.
The only thing I can tell you about this small stone building just across the narrow street from the graveyard is a bit of speculation. It looks like some chapel to me. But the traditional public bread ovens also looked more or less this way.
Here you can see a group of old houses in the area on the opposite side of the graveyard.
A local cat that was passing by stopped for a moment in front of one of those houses ...
... and became a part of this architecture-themed post.
The outer side of the old, drystone walls was accidentally decorated with some self-seeding weeds that look great when in bloom.
Here you can see the Allium neapolitanum flowers. In the following photograph ...
... I came a bit closer to those flowers.
Soon I noticed an interesting yellow detail on the Mercurialis annua plant.
Today, after a quick Internet search, I found out that this is the Melampsora pulcherrima ...
... a fungal pathogen that attacks specifically the Mercurialis annua plant.
In this last photograph, you can see an old detail, similar in style to those found on the tombstones, surrounded by a new facade on one of the houses near the graveyard.