Pula is to me the nearest city. I live in Medulin, a small, tourism-oriented town about ten kilometers south of Pula.
In 1856, with the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone for the future Arsenal on the 9th of December, the Bay of Pula started the transformation into the main military port of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.
His Austrian Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty Franz Joseph The First and his wife Empress Elisabeth The First were the biggest celebrities attending the event.
According to contemporaries, the emperor hit the stone with a hammer three times, the imperial flag was raised on the nearby flagpole, the military band played the Imperial anthem and twenty-one cannon platoons echoed from the old fortresses all around the city.
That kind of project needed many workers, so many wooden barracks were built in the peninsula called Stoja for the people coming to work mainly from what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Through the following decades, as the work was progressing, some big stone buildings were added to the working-class district of Stoja.
The name of the neiberhood was "The Barracks" and its inhabitants were derogatorily called "the Barrackers."
The wooden barracks aren't there anymore but the name remained.
And now, after this fairly long, and, I hope captivating intro ...
... let's take a walk around "The Barracks" of Stoja.
The life is still going on in the old buildings. Some of them recently got new facades. Here you can see two of those tract-housing-ancestors standing next to each other. One shows its rugged texture made of many stones while the other is coated in fresh, smooth yellow.
In this wide shot, you can see more details of that same street of "The Barracks." There is a rugged old house on one side and a renovated old house on the other. The renovated one is showcasing a fine apricot facade. In the following photograph ...
... I'm approaching another rugged old building. In the area near the left edge of the picture, you can see a detail from another building of the same type. That one was showing its stony texture everywhere except for a small lateral area with some new balconies.
When I came closer to get this architectural portrait, I noticed some relatively fresh, contemporary details on the building that looked completely rugged from a distance.
There is a small grocery store in one corner of the building so a small part of the facade is fresh and yellow.
A good chunk of the building's front facade is nicely decorated with satellite dishes. I mean, these antennae have a function but since the old building looks pretty good with new stuff on its facade, I perceive than as decorations. Most of the satellite dishes were in excellent or fairly good shape three days ago when I took all the photographs presented in today's post.
Only this one, which could have been mounted in the times of Franz Joseph and the Monarchy if satellite dishes were a thing back then, was very rusted.
Here you can take a look at one of the windows of the building across the road. In the following photograph ...
... you can see yet another building of the same type. This architecture can look pretty impressive from a certain angle.
While I was approaching the building portrayed in this shot ...
... a local dog approached the friend who was there with me.
It was a friendly old dog, cute and fluffy.
When my friend decided to continue the walk around the neighborhood, the dog put a paw on her leg and said; "Stay a little bit longer, please."
In this photograph, I zoomed in on the laundry hanging on the long lines stretched between the building and some trees.
I love to see the clothes hanging on the line in the cities. It's decorative, diverse, and more or less different on different occasions.
Many mundane things that are part of everyday life look more photogenic and interesting than the stuff someone designed to be decorative.
Here you can see a relatively long line of small garages that belong to the inhabitants of the buildings in "The Barracks."
A minute later, I photographed a short line of laundry between two poles near one of the slightly bigger garages across the road.
During World War II most of these buildings were more or less damaged by the bombardments. They were repaired in the first decade after the war to provide accommodation for some of the workers of the historic shipyard which went through an impressive modernization and development during the period when the city was part of the socialist Yugoslavia.
This photograph shows the structures on the top of an oil platform that is currently a work in progress there in the shipyard. The thin lines of those industrial structures look surprisingly good among the branches of the trees that have lost most of their foliage.
Here you can see the front facade of another rugged old building and two slick silver machines parked near its entrance.
This is yet another building of the same type.
Here you can see modern garbage containers made for selective, ecologically enlightened waste collection.
On the wall behind the garbage cans, there was an artwork.
I mean, I saw two artworks on that wall. Here is the second one. They look like a work of the same author. In the following photograph ...
... you can see another line of clothes drying on a gentle breeze that was blowing on that sunny winter day. This line, stretched between two neighboring buildings, was situated pretty high.
Not far from my car parked in front of a building on the edge of "The Barracks." neiberhood, there was a scooter with some pieces of fabric on the dashboard and the handlebars. The scooter was in good shape, it looked pretty much new to me so those torn pieces of old, washed-out fabric definitively looked out of place on it. Definitely an unusual scene, if you ask me.
With this photograph is time to end our visit to "The Barracks." But the post doesn't end here because...
... well, becouse I spent about half an hour in another suburban part of Pula after leaving Stoja. Here you can see some buildings in Shiana. The photograph was taken from the bus terminal of Pula.
The friend you saw earlier in the post went to buy bread and donuts in the bakery near the terminal so I took a couple of photographs while waiting.
Shiana appeared in some of my older posts where I wrote about that part of the city so I won't tell you anything about Shiana here. Today's post is about Stoja and Stoja only. Consider these few unrelated shots as something similar to those bonus tracks nobody asked for that appear on some CDs.
It was raining the night before so I was able to catch this reflection in one of the puddles on the parking lot.
Here you can see the dead leaves fallen from the Platanus orientalis tree.
AND THAT'S IT. HOPE YOU ENJOYED THE TOUR. AS ALWAYS HERE ON HIVE, THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MY WORK - THE END.
