Photography by Iva Lulić

My vacation spot lies amongst picturesque hillsides of Northern Croatia called Zagorje - its just an hour drive towards North from Zagreb, sleepy little villages and towns comfortably nested amongst the hills but not so distant from the capitol, convenient for weekend visitors escaping hustle of the big city. Thanks to its unique geological properties, Zagorje has abundance of natural health spas and all sorts of cutest old chapels and medieval castles - one of them is just a short walk away from my cottage, huge imposing castle called Veliki Tabor (Great Castle) that used to belong to various aristocratic families trough the centuries, recently beautifully restored and it serves as museum/exhibition place now. I will write more about the castle on another occasion, but right now I want to share with you something I have discovered yesterday during my walk.

It might sound as a paradox that I enjoy my vacation here, since usually work leads me to such various celebrated tourist destinations all over the world as Athens, Istanbul, Rome, Monte Carlo and Barcelona but its exactly because I am constantly there, that I find peace and tranquillity here in the shadow of the great castle. In the daytime the view down the hills towards the village is heart-warming and in the evenings there is absolutely no sound except occasional deer, fox or hedgehog (hedgehogs apparently huff and puff a lot while rustling amongst the leaves, which used to freak me out until I found out where this sound comes from). Frequently the visitors arrive here with a bus and the whole line of visitors invade the road towards the castle - to my embarrassment, I must admit that I walk very rarely towards what is the biggest local attraction simply because its so close that I take it for granted as a part of "my" land but yesterday I walked there, out of curiosity to check out exhibition of art by Croatian soldiers. As usual, I arrived for one thing just to get completely distracted by something else. 

Instead of what I came here for, my attention was piqued by beautiful posters with stunning photographs from another, probably previous exhibition and I simply had to find out who is the photographer. Her name is Iva Lulić and she is brilliant artists indeed, apparently inspired by Croatian folk legends and mythology as you can see from her creations - since I have never seen anything like this before (kind of combination of dreams, mythology, costumes and theatre) I just talked about it the rest of the day and now decided to share her work with you here, because it makes me very proud that we have somebody so creative and talented.