You can see quite a few colorful billboards on the ten kilometers - long stretch of road that leads from the city of Pula straight to the small town called Vodnjan and vice versa.
Most of those adverts are trying to direct the driver's attention towards the Internet service providers, fashion brands, and some local products like olive oil and vine, but among all that usual stuff ...
... I found something less ordinary and kinda mysterious along that familiar road that I drove so many times before, so I stopped to take a couple of photographs, and that led to an idea for today's post.
The thing looked like just another advert for olive oil.
"SAN ANTONIO. THE BEST IN CROATIA, AGAIN." stated the advert.
But on the other side of the same billboard ...
... there was this mysterious thought written in black letters on the plain white background. The font was basic and the whole thing looked like a piece of dystopian propaganda. Like something from the "They Live" movie.
To see that sentence "JESUS CHRIST, HAVE MERCY ON ME, A SINNER" wasn't anything surprising or shocking in itself, but in this context, among the ordinary adverts, it was a surprising piece of text.
I mean, what the hell you wanna say with this, and to who? To yourself. To me? All the driving sinners in their machines? And the most important question - who the hell is saying this? An anonymous sinner? The Catholic church? A lonely murderer? Ed Gein's mother? Some deranged moralist? Who the fuck is sinning what, why, to who, where, how ... definitively a pretty confusing statement.
Seven hours and a long Internet search later - I still don't know the answer. I found out only that these writings appeared in a couple of places in Croatia, and that's it. The author and the intention are unknown.
Here you can see the circle of ashes near the billboard. The remains of a bonfire. It looks like something symbolic and mysterious. A ritual place or something like that. It looks kinda powerful but is not. There is an olive orchard nearby, and some branches were probably burned here after the seasonal trimming of the trees.
After taking these photographs near the suburbs of Vodnjan, I decided to drive back to Pula again to find more billboard-related stuff that could make this post longer.
There was a storm here, more or less a month ago.
It was a pretty strong storm that was able to dramatically change one of the billboards between Vodnjan and Pula.
Fortunately for this post, the bent billboard wasn't repaired, so I was able to include this interesting detail ...
... that looks like a big table ready for a picnic by the side of the road.
AND THAT'S IT. WITH THIS ORDINARY ADVERT FOR ONE OF THE INTERNET PROVIDERS THAT STATES THAT THE ONE CALLED A1 IS THE FASTEST IN CROATIA, IS TIME TO END THIS POST. AS ALWAYS IN THESE POSTS ON HIVE, THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MY WORK - THE END.
P.S. I was sure that today is Sunday. I lived in that delusion the whole day. Only now, after publishing the Sunday post, a friend passed this way and told me ( and proved) that is Saturday.