AN HOUR WITH THE GREAT PYRAMID

The pyramid was built in an attractive area on the outskirts of Pula.

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You can see its top from the road that leads from the suburban block buildings to the big hotels on the city riviera. It was built long ago. In ancient times when I was a kid. In the year of our Lord 1985.

It wasn't made to be a tomb. It wasn't built by aliens. And as far as I know, this thing can't focus or amplify mysterious energies and there's nothing mysterious in general about the great pyramid of Pula. Although, yeah, the fact that is abandoned can appear a bit mysterious.

The pyramid was part of a pretty large socialist project that aimed to update the tourism offer and infrastructure to the western European standard of the hedonistic eighties. Some hotels, some golf courses, and many places where you can play tennis near the sea were built in the same year.

You can still play tennis in the small club behind the central building of this post ...

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... but there's no more dancing in the great pyramid. Yes, this was a discotheque. Disko Piramida. The most iconic one in the city. Maybe it wasn't a great pyramid, but many, myself included, could easily agree that it was a great discotheque that left a strong mark on the social life of the second half of the eighties.

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Since the place is closed to the public, I wasn't able to explore the interior. This shot was all I could get through the rusted bars.
At some point, probably in 1988 or 1989, I started visiting the pyramid from time to time. Now, when I see the stripped interior with no glitter or shine, the place looks gloomy and much smaller, but back then, with the changing music background made of all kinds of eighties music, dancing around the rounded floor was pretty epic and exciting.
Besides the pyramid, Pula had some smaller, kinda makeshift discotheques that played always the same genres, counting on the same crowd. The pyramid was different. Here you could hear stuff from punk rock and heavy metal to soul, rap, you name it - including the lightest of the lightweight pop. And you could meet a wide variaty of people, which means that you could also see a nice variaty of hairstyles and outfits. Which is very cool. I liked that eclectic atmosphere very much.

Here you can take another look at the small tennis club behind the former discotheque.

Unlike on the rusty pyramid, things are here well-kept and recently painted.

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Calling this a great pyramid is a joke of course, but it isn't something I invented for the post. Some people used to call it that way back in the eighties, so the name has a relatively solid history. As you can see in this photograph that shows the upper terrace, the great pyramid isn't a perfect pyramid from every angle.

When the discotheque was in function, it was surrounded by spotlights that made it look cool and impressive at night. It was a shiny beacon for the crowd infected with Saturday night fever. When seen from a distance, the place looked strange and futuristic. Like something out of the old Scy - Fy movies.

These triangular things that, along with the fence, form a barrier around the pyramid, still look pretty cool and get very well along with the shape of the building.

On one of those, I found an emotional message, written probably by a teenager, in 2002.

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The concrete wall on the other side of the building follows the same visual logic.

In some places, the wall was covered with patches of something green that looked like some kind of algae or biological stuff that came from outer space.

A very ordinary land snail was also hanging there.

Seven years after its appearance, in 1992, the pyramid was closed and then abandoned.

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Here you can see the rusted covered passage that leads to the entrance. The thing looks like something from the Fallout video game. In the following photograph ...

... you can take a look at the fig tree that grew on the outer wall of the passage.

Nature is taking over the dissolving discotheque.

While I was exploring the area around the pyramid, my car was parked fifty meters from there, in front of this pretty large flat building ...

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... that looks like some kind of storage facility or factory.

I have no information about this place. Didn't bother to get closer and explore a bit back then on the 19th of May 2022 when all these photographs were taken, and today I wasn't able to find anything about it on the Internet. The chimneys shown in the above photograph were the most interesting part of the building because I saw some kind of strange extraterrestrial worms in them. Well, for a moment, at least.

From there, I could also zoom in and bring closer some pretty large block buildings from the suburban neighborhood called Veruda.

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Because of the lush vegetation, only the upper parts of those buildings were visible.

The old pine tree in the center of this shot was photographed closer to the pyramid.

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The ground around the tree was covered with many bindweed flowers.

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Seventy years before the appearance of the discotheque, during World War I, the same place was hosting four big cannons turned towards the sea to protect that stretch of coastline under the administration of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in case of the Italian naval attack that never happened. The war ended with the collapse of that Empire, the cannons were dismantled, and the place was left waiting for some new purpose.

I spent about an hour getting the photographs shown in the post, which explains the title. It was an hour with the great pyramid, and I hope you enjoyed it as I did back then in May of this year, which will end soon.

AND THAT'S IT. AS ALWAYS HERE ON HIVE, THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MY WORK - THE END.