Yesterday I finally took that picture of the little St.Luke church and the nice new house nearby that fit very nicely in the landscape, from the road above. I’ve been planning to do something about it for years already but the vantage point is such that you can take the shot only with a telephoto, and since I didn’t have one I planned on sending a drone, but I didn’t want to disturb people with it in season, and out of season it was either cloudy or windy, and so for one reason or another it always got postponed.

The crow on top of the church is a nice accidental detail that made me chuckle due to symbolism. 🙂

It feels nice to check those boxes.

I also went to the nearby abandoned hotel that went to ruin after some succession failure after the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the sight is horrifying, because it didn’t just go to ruin like Pripyat, because it was abandoned. No; the locals systematically broke every piece of glass, every piece of furniture, spray-vandalised the walls, and even brought in old car tyres and who knows what other waste to dispose of here. It looks as if the Orcs came and made a point in destroying everything and making it as ugly as possible in a manifestation of their consciousness and choices.

It doesn’t look post-apocalyptic, in a sense where nature takes over human cities after humans are gone. I’ve seen such places, where the nature reclaims its own and the feeling is always calm, restful and beautiful. No, this is not like that; there’s a Mad Max post-civilisation look to it, the way things must have felt after the fall of Rome, where the barbarians plundered everything that wasn’t bolted to the walls, and then set the rest on fire, or scrawled some illiterate nonsense on the walls, smeared shit on temple altars, and then gradually used stone from old buildings of forgotten meaning to build their unsophisticated primitive stuff.

That’s why I felt the symbolism of that crow on the church so strongly, as if it were a sign.