This place is a leisure marina with a great view of the interesting stuff across the bay. The big shipyard and the old city. The city in question is Pula and the name of the marina is " Marina Polesana". Pula is called Pola in Italian and the word Polesana in the name means " from Pula" in that language which has the same weight in the administration and many other aspects of life in the bilingual city.
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In this opening shot, a pretty big fishing boat equipped for hunting the sardines at night is passing by the shipyard where a much bigger boat is being constructed.
All the photographs in this post were taken late in the morning, the right time to catch the fishing boats on their way to the harbor.
To get this shot I had to use most of my camera's zooming capability ...
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... because I was pretty far from the scene, on one of the piers of the marina. Marina Polesana is a brand-new addition to the city. It was finished and opened to the public on the 12th of April this year. As always in this area, the project was accompanied by controversies, mostly due to the shady past of the entrepreneur involved in it and the shady way in which the city business is run in general. Being a country that has gone through the transition from the corruption-friendly socialist way of doing things in Yugoslavia to the current brand of corruption-friendly capitalism intertwined more with politics & nepotism than with the free market, Croatia has no shortage of similar stories.
Anyway, the marina is here now, and it doesn't look bad to me, so in this post, I'll just enjoy it without getting too much into the behind-the-scenes stuff.
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One of the cool aspects of this place is the amount of interesting stuff you can photograph from here with a bit of zooming. In this shot, you can see a stretch of the old Pula, part of the Roman amphitheater & the church of St. Anthony, behind the long dock built probably during the administration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
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The other cool thing about this marina (well, for me, at least) is that the fancy leisure boats are juxtaposed with the massive, gray buildings of the former military base. However, this will probably change in the near future, and the old military complex will be replaced with new hotels in line with nautical tourism.
One of the historic buildings was recently demolished.
The building in the background of this photograph is there since 1912. The first military base in this part of the bay was built in the middle decades of the 19th century, so you can find some older stuff as well.
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In this photograph, the focus is on the distant Roman amphitheater built between the years 27 BC and 68 AD. The large, well-preserved amphitheater is the most iconic piece of architecture in the city.
Here you can take a more up-close look at one of the boats moored in the marina. I chose it because of its color. Most boats were completely white, which is okay, but this pale, slightly greenish shade of blue looked more interesting to me.
Here you can see Emil, a friend of mine and a freelance handyman who can repair a wide variety of things on all kinds of boats. But when it comes to his own car, he needs a car mechanic. While Emil's van was being repaired somewhere in the city, I was driving him to work and back home, to Medulin, our hometown.
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While walking along one of the piers behind Emil, I came across this interesting piece of (probably) accidental art. The ropes left down on the ground have formed a stylized flower.
In this photograph, I zoomed in on the waterfront stairs.
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Here you can see another boat. One of those typical white ones.
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You can always create a nice abstract composition with the sails, it doesn't require much effort and the result usually looks pretty good, so I did it here.
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In this photograph, you can see some hangars in the shipyard, and you can also take a better, more up-close look at the church of St. Anthony that was first introduced in one of the shots earlier in this post. This church is a relatively new addition to the old city. It was finished in 1931. The 45 meters tall church tower was finished a year later.
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The post started with a detail of the shipyard, and I'd like to close it with a wider, more scenic look at that same place. Here you can see the tall cranes and the ship that is currently under construction there. The thing looks a bit like some weird monster that surfaced from the bay.
