While walking through the Franjevački squarre, in front of the County palace, some song playing through my headphones and my mind lost somewhere else, I have ignored for a week something that has always been there, hidden in a narrow alley in front of the county palace. Hanging still between two buildings there are angels whose faces are lit blue, green and pink.
> ŠPANJOLKA U VARAŽDINU Sveprisutni anđeli prate me na svakom koraku u gradu
> SPANISH GIRL IN VARAŽDIN Rain, popcorn… And ‘klipići’
Sometimes, if you look carefully or lon enough, I’m pretty sure they’d be lulling their heads to the music played for them, a gloomy tune that sets the mood. You cannot really appreciate if they are staring at the people passing by. To notice them you have to look twice and then you will see the sign where it reads ‘Andjelinjak’.
Once you’ve seen them, it’s never the same though: you cannot really avoid thinking about their gaze observing from afar the passersby; it’s impossible to ignore the other angels lazing around the city, painted in wall, watching from the windows, waiting to be bought as a souvenir, etc. I guess they’re meant to be a protector element in Varazdin.
Maybe they’re also something that makes the city different. The amount of statues and motives referring to angels reminds me of my hometown, a smaller city than Varazdin close to Alicante (somewhere close to the coast in southeast Spain). Ibi, that’s the name, is also known around as the ‘toy town’ because of the amount of factories dedicated to manufacture toys that blossomed during the first decades of the 20th century and prospered later on. I apologize, this is not meant to be a history lesson of some random spanish town.
This is just some context to explain that in Ibi, parks, museums and even hotels evolve around toys and related things. For example, in one of the squares there’s one of the few statues (nothing really cool, just some random trivia) to ‘The Three Wise Men’, Los Reyes Magos in Spanish, the three men that bring presents according to the our Christmas tradition.
They are scattered around the city. The angels. Albeit not all of them have the same faces. Painted on some door, one of them watches my way I follow to the supermarket and the post office. This one though is just painted in black a sweet innocent smile decorating the face. It could be just a drawing plastered in a wall, but in this place there are too many of them not to notice, not to comment.
I wonder if they also follow me on a saturday morning when I find myself in the green market snapping some pictures at the different associations and teams cooking ‘kotlovina’. I don’t know if the lively music, the dances and the loud chatter and cheerings are suitable characteristics for this tiny creatures in down in that narrow alley, with that sweet knowing smirks.
Maybe the smell of meat is too much, maybe the people eating while standing or acquaintances and friends greeting each other are not what they have to look after, maybe that cheerful and loud moment at 12,30 at the greenmarket is a little bit far and a little bit too happy for their gloomy and calm aura.
Leaving the Market and heading to the Old Town you might think the haunting presence of this porcelain creatures is long forgotten, left in front of the County Palace. However, there’s one almost flying, almost going out of the window at the corner and there are some of them laying outside a round window. Seeing this, I wonder whether there are some I haven’t seen on our way to the cinema on saturday evening. The façades of kino Gaj seem to have escaped their presence. Surprising.
