On my way to the nearest tobacco shop, late in the morning of the first day of June 2016, I stopped by a ruin of a house that was getting ready to become something new in the same old place, about fifty meters from the main square of Medulin, my hometown.
The relatively small excavator looked pretty cool inside the old house that had lost its roof and all the details of its interior. The machine surrounded by rugged walls and rubble caught my attention so I took this photograph that ended up as the opening picture of today's post, and then ...
... I came closer to explore the fragments of the old patterns, still visible on the walls.
This is one of only a few old houses in my neighborhood that I never entered as a kid. There were no other kids to visit there, and furthermore, I remember hearing rumors and stories about the alleged extreme grumpiness of the man who owned the place and lived in the city about ten kilometers north of Medulin, the small town this post is set in.
In those childhood days, the interior of the old house was a great mystery to me and my friends from the neiberhood.
I can remember us passing by that house on our way back from school and fantasizing & theorizing about what the interior could look like and what could be hidden there. I was obsessed with Horror and Science Fiction in books, comic books, and movies back then, in the early eighties, so for me, the house was usually filled with the latest thing I watched or read about.
In 2016, on the 1st of June, I finally saw a few fragments of that house's interior.
There wasn't much to see, but, becouse of my history with that old house, what little was there, was a joy to explore for me.
In some sense, I saw even more than I would have seen in those times when the house was in good shape. The destruction brought to light older layers of the wall coating.
And so, I had these old shots from 2016 for years on my computer, but I didn't know what to do with them. A vague sensation that the material could become useful one day kept me from deleting it during the occasional purges that obliterated some of the old stuff.
Yesterday, with this post in mind, I decided to walk the same road again and photograph the same house to show you its new exterior at the end of the story.
I don't have any photographs of the old house before it was eviscerated and destroyed, but believe me, it was fairly similar to the new one. The most striking similarity is the lovely terrace, with many little columns, that looks practically the same. I remember the house standing out from the neighboring ones becouse of that terrace, back then when I was a kid.
And that's it. Hope you enjoyed this small vignette made of architecture and memories.
