AN ABANDONED MILITARY FACILITY IN PALERA

Palera is a coastal area situated a couple of kilometers from the village of Liznjan and about five kilometers from where live. I visit Palera regularly for its beaches and large open meadows rich with interesting flora and fauna. A good chunk of that area was closed to the public until the late 90s because of the military base utilized for airforce training.

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On the 1st of June 2015, I spent some time exploring the remains of that military past. In this opening shot, you can see me sitting in the largest room of the fairly large one-story building at the center of what was once a military base. I was posing in a fake thoughtful pose, pretending to thoroughly explore the piece of glass I found on the floor when the selfie was taken. There wasn't anything special in that shard.

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It was just one of many similar pieces on the ground before my feet. In the following photograph ...

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... you can take a good look at the entire room.

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This shot was taken in one of the much smaller rooms. The atmosphere was much darker there around 9 AM.

Thanks to the pretty good night vision setting of my small, partially broken compact camera, I was able to photograph this dead crane fly in the gloom down on the floor.

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That night view option was producing images in the greenish tinge that can be seen in this photograph. I decided to turn the previous scene into black & white through Photoshop because it looked more serious and dramatic that way.

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In the evening, around 8 PM, the atmosphere was gloomy again in that room, but it was gloomy in a considerably different way.

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A beautiful, and kind of mysterious, rectangle appeared on one of the walls. The thing looked a bit like a portal, like a window to some unknown dimension.
In some vague, indirect way it reminded me of the Space Odyssey monolith as well.

Here you can see how the evening looked on the outside.

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This is the entrance of the place that looks like a former bathroom. Or maybe a kitchen. Something like that.

Here I zoomed in on one of the discreetly decorated ceramic tiles on the wall. Didn't expect any flowers in a military building like this.

This door ...

... was lying on the floor of another relatively small room.

This is a detail from the next room down the hall. The word "POZOR" means attention in my language.

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"Enjoy your trip." someone wrote on the wall there. I wonder what kind of experience could hallucinogenics give me in this quiet, post-apocalyptic atmosphere.

The next room I visited ...

... was a small bathroom, I think. I took a selfie in a piece of broken mirror there.

On the floor, there was a bushcricket. A Yersinella raymondi bushcricket.

This spider was hanging near the only window.

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Here you can see me posing once more in the largest room that looks like some kind of lobby or a living room and is morning again.

I found some cool stuff to photograph on the floor there.

A high-heeled shoe surrounded by syringes isn't something I see every day.

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Here you can see an empty package of some stockings. The brand is called Mia.

Kolumbo is one of the cigarette brands produced in the tobacco factory in Rovinj. Rovinj is a coastal town fifty kilometers north-west of this area.
I remember smoking this thing in high school. These cigarettes were cheap but ugly. They smelled pretty bad and were prone to leave some kind of burning sensation in the mouth. Felt like a great way to get cancer without investing too much in it.

You can see a canned monster here. It's a monster inside the can, a bit like a genie inside the lamp. Or maybe is just a drink that can make a monster out of you. I don't know, not an expert on this stuff.

Here you can see the colorful package of the food for parrots.

This fly was posing on a piece of plastic foil.

This elegant piece of pottery attached to the ceiling was built by some wasps from the Eumeninae subfamily of the large and varied Vespidae family.

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In this set of six photographs, you can see me posing in a room with surprisingly pinky walls. Back then, in 2015, I forgot to photograph the building's exterior and its surroundings ...

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... so I did it today.

The vegetation at the entrance was different now.

The blackberry shrubs have formed a fairly tall barrier all around the building.

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Here you can see the old, rusted observation post across the unpaved road.

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Since I was already there, I decided to enter and take a few more shots of the interior. There were some interesting changes. The lush vegetation was creeping through the window, I saw a bit of green on the floor as well, and the walls were covered with artwork. In this photograph, you can see the largest room, the one that looks like a lobby or a living room photographed from, more or less, the same angle as in one of the shots at the beginning of this post.

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This angle revealed more art.

Here you can see something written in a beautiful, very ornate font in the same room.

Here you can take a look through the hole in the ceiling.

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Someone has prepared a camping place in one of the smaller rooms.

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You can take a look down the hall in this shot.

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Here I zoomed in a bit.

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Hers you can take another look at the exterior.

In this photograph, I zoomed in on the elements of the wooden construction of the porch.

These are the remains of some electric stuff on the front facade, near the entrance.

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In this last shot, you can see how the decaying building and the nearby observation post look from a distance, surrounded and partially hidden by the tree heather shrubs and other Mediterranean vegetation.