It was the 31 of October, an ordinary Tuesday before the All Saints' Day. I brought the lanterns & flowers, and I did the usual small maintenance work on my grandparent's graves a few days before. On that Tuesday, the only thing to do was light the lanterns. I visited two graveyards on that occasion. The one in Marchana, the village about 20-25 kilometers north of where I live, and the graveyard in Medulin, my hometown. The following photograph ...
... was taken on the way back home. The lantern was lit, and I was returning from Marchana. I photographed the wet road and the gloomy scenery from the car while driving slowly with one hand on the wheel and the other busy holding the camera. The traffic is very low on this stretch of country lane between the villages of Liznjan and Shishan so the drive & shoot action wasn't stressful at all.
For this shot, I stopped by the side of the road. The photograph was taken a bit earlier, less than a kilometer from the village of Valtura.
The rain was sparse and gentle the whole time. Here you can see the stretch of the road between the villages of Valtura and Shishan.
This is the graveyard of Medulin. I mean, you can see part of it in this shot. It's a fairly large cemetery. Much larger than I remember it as a kid. My hometown has grown a lot in the last few decades. The building in the background is the small Church of St. Cross.
At that point, the rain had stopped, so I was able to unconstrainedly photograph out of the car. The flowers on the graves were covered with droplets. In this photograph, you can see the yellow pansy flowers.
In this wide shot, you can see some graves with their flowers and portraits in the foreground, while the background shows the relatively big apartment buildings that surround the cemetery. On one of the graves ...
... I saw a floral arrangement that stood out from the others.
It looked like an exuberant boat on which an angel was sailing to the world on the other side.
The small, petrified angel looked very good amidst that artificial vegetation from the local supermarket.
Here you can see the beautifully twisted rosemary shrub that grows on the patch of land between the grave of my aunt and the graves of some other deceased Medulinians unrelated to me.
A couple of hours earlier, on the road to Marchana, the weather was cloudy but less gloomy than the weather shown in the first three photographs of today's post.
In this shot, I accidentally focused on the sparse raindrops on my windshield while shooting and driving at the same time so the scenery is nicely or annoyingly blurred. Every time I see this photograph, I experience it differently. I mean, in two opposite ways. Sometimes it looks like an irritating piece of blurred crap, and sometimes like an elegant artsy image that conveys the symbolism & melancholy of an open road.
The clouds were definitively majestic, blurred, or sharp, it didn't matter. The sky looked great on the way to Marchana.