A PLACE CALLED BARBARIGA

This time I drove about 20 - 25 kilometers to the small seaside village called Barbariga ...

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... and did my usual midweek walk there.

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It started here, about a kilometer from the village, among the buildings with apartments for summer rental. This is is the only part of Barbariga that I visited before.

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From here onward things were new and exciting.

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I parked in front of a closed grocery store. The glass walls were carpeted with a series of beer adverts. Since every poster was exactly the same, the thing looked like Warhol's lost masterpiece.

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After taking another shot from the parking place, I walked to the old village.

Here you can see the first house. The village is situated about fifty meters from the end of the asphalt road.

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It has only one narrow street, a couple of houses on each side of that street ...

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... and that's it. The whole village looks like the main square of a typical village in this area if that main square was somehow teleported in the middle of green fields and has remained like that, weirdly isolated from the rest. The only person around was this little girl, and her new colorful dress looked great and kind of surreal among the old, washed-out stuff of the village. It was a perfect photographic moment that lasted only a couple of seconds because the girl was on her way home. Soon entered one of the two renovated houses with fresh facades and disappeared like some ghostly apparition.

While rambling around ...

... I encountered some cats too. I always encounter some cats on my ramblings around small towns and villages in Istra, the peninsula on which I live. This time I had some cat food cans with me because I visited the supermarket in the city before continuing towards Barbariga, so I opened one can and fed these two feline Barbarigians.

The place was named after a noble Venetian family Barbarigo who had properties here, in the centuries when this coast was dominated by the Venetian Republic.

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This is the biggest building in the village. It looks like a pretty old villa, but I can't tell you when was built. Didn't find any information about it. It's difficult to photograph because the surrounding vegetation grew very close to the building.

It's much easier to get the details ...

... then the thing its entirety.

Here you can see the first-floor entry of one of the smaller old houses of Barbariga.

Here you can take a look at the rear facade of the neighboring house.

This is the same thing, the same house, but I was focused only on lower windows for this shot.

This is the window on the rear facade of the next house in that row of houses.

This is a look through the passageway that leads out of the village.

This is some old, decaying building not far from the village. About fifty meters from there. Only the top is visible, the rest is hidden by dense, thorny vegetation, blackberry shrubs, and wild roses mostly. After taking this photograph ...

... I walked to the sea ...

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... but before arriving there and photographing these open vistas ...

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... I had to pass through a stretch of pine forest.

I found some mushrooms there ...

... but that's another story - more about these mushrooms in the upcoming Fungi Friday post. Not far from the mushrooms ...

... there was an old, abandoned fortress.

This is just a small part of the much larger defensive complex built around the year 1900 by the Austro - Hungarian empire to protect one of its most important naval bases in the city of Pula.

Here you can take a look through the small window shown in the previous photograph.

Here you can see one of the larger windows of the fortress and in the following photograph ...

... you can take another look inside. After taking these photographs ...

... I walked to the main entrance ...

... and entered the dark, decaying interior. In this photograph the space in the right corner of the picture is completely black, the dark is impenetrable, but ...

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... but I took also this long exposure shot that shows some reflection in the shallow water and a bit of garbage hidden in that dark corner.

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Here I'm entering another room, deeper in the building. I passed through that room and then through a broken wall ...

... I entered this pretty large place.

A friend was there with me. You can see her standing by the barred window in this photograph. Like a prisoner in some very shity, rundown prison or a person lost in Silent Hill or some other creepy place. The doorway in the right corner of the picture ...

... was leading to the space shown in one of the first photographs from this series of shots dedicated to the fortress.

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Here you can take a look at both shots simultaneously.

I came across some lovely fragments of light ...

... in the darkness of this part of the old fort.

I took most of these photographs using only the ambient light, but for the following shot ...

... I used the flash of my camera to make visible the small fragment of the outside landscape that can be seen through the narrow embrasure.

In 2005 I bought a video game called Uru: Ages Beyond Myst. Ages in Myst, the long series of adventure games, are interesting, surreal, and often breathtakingly beautiful fictional realms for the player to explore while progressing through a series of pretty difficult puzzles. One of the ages in Uru is called Gahreesen - the fortress age.

At moments I felt trapped inside that video game while standing here in the real-life fortress. All those quadrangles, holes, and rays of sunlight looked like parts of some complex puzzle.

Fortunately, I could leave the place without solving the thing. I'm pretty slow and inept when it comes to solving puzzles. It took me ages to pass through all those ages in Myst.