On the 15th of May, in the year of our lord 2024 ...
... boats were burning in the harbour of Medulin, the small town where I live.
Speedboats, sailboats, excursion boats; all fine, expensive nautical stuff. A few million euros went up in smoke that day.
No one was dead or injured, fortunately, so you can enjoy the apocalyptic scenery shown in these photographs without excessive guilt; the insurance probably brought the level of financial tragedy to a tolerable level.
I woke up at dawn for no particular reason, and then, when I saw a column of distant smoke, it was time to sit in the car and do a bit of investigation. It was a dense, dark smoke that can't be seen often from my quiet neighborhood.
I drove to the peninsula called Vizula, a place across the bay from the harbour ...
... and started following the events ...
... through the lens of my camera.
The zooming capability of the Canon PowerShot SX60 HS is pretty impressive.
The fire and smoke are shape-shifters that make the scene look slightly different from frame to frame; that's why I took many photographs on that occasion.
This is the best one of them all, in my opinion. The right moment was caught. The smoke created a lovely, baroque shape above the boats. The pretty big excursion boat in flames, shown in this and many other photographs I uploaded so far ...
... is still here in the bay of Medulin. I took this photograph an hour ago in Vizula.
You can see the "then" and "now" side by side in these two shots.
The weather is nice today, and the light coming through the clouds looks good ...
... so I took a few more photographs by the sea. In this one, you can see a bit of the scenery. The distant town, more visible if you enlarge the photograph by clicking on it, is Medulin, my hometown.
This is a detail from the same burned, rusty boat, a hole that shows a bit of sky on the other side.
As I moved a bit, the fragment of sky was visible through another hole.
You can see the top of the boat in this shot.
Back then, on the 15th of May 2024, while the boats were burning ...
... this little egret (Egretta garzetta) was calmly exploring the shallows of Vizula in search of small fishes or some similar edibles.
The bird's demeanor was in stark contrast with the events across the bay.
It looked like a naval battle was taking place there in the fancy part of the harbour.
Silhouettes of the firefighters appeared for a moment through the dense smoke when this photograph was taken.
Twenty-two boats were heavily damaged on that occasion.
After months of investigation, on the 16th of August 2024, it was revealed that the fire wasn't an accident. Only one of the boats was a target, the others were collateral damage. Two dudes have thrown some kind of Molotov cocktail and ran away. That's all I've read from the official sources. Can't tell you the current status of this story. There's nothing recent on the Internet. Or I can't find it.
The unofficial rumors circulating around town, from bar to bar, from beer to beer, tell the story of a feud between local tourism-oriented businesses.
