The coastal street is bathed in silver mid-afternoon sunshine. It’s May, and midday can be hot enough to swim. The first sunbathers are here too, but it still feels off-season. The street next to the sea is pedestrian. Its numerous shops, food kiosks and restaurants are still closed. They look a bit worn down, their canopies crooked and bent, but we can easily imagine how, when their doors will open in the summer evenings and their entrances, as well as the street in front, will be packed with sunhats, jewelry, flip flops, sunglasses, towels, sunscreen, inflatables and the like, the scrapped off color and the torn fabric will become an unperceivable background.

          I can smell the density of the crowd that pours onto this street after dark in the summer, a long continuous stream along the coast. The smell of coconut sunscreen, fried squid, candyfloss and popcorn. I was in it so many times as a child. With a sunburnt face, dressed up for ice cream, moving very slowly among hundreds of others, and, only once every summer, having dinner in one of the restaurants.

            The floor around a hotel swimming pool smells of fresh paint and it has only a few sun loungers displayed to invite guests. The beach in front of this hotel across the street is only semi-private, for now. We learn this, when a young man in a white T-shirt comes to tell us to move to the right side of a flag erected in the middle of the platform, because only that part of the beach is open to non-hotel guests. The beach exhibits signs of wear too, but some of the cracks will be repaired, the colors freshened up. The rest will merge and also become background when the area will be tended to with cocktail deliveries, soft towels and sun, as well as a selection of interesting guests to observe.

A new season is close.

           The difference between private and public beaches is not easy to perceive now. In some parts of the long coast, there are large concrete platforms that here and there reveal rusted iron rod constructions, stairs leading nowhere, or big chunks of concrete that somehow detached and are now turned sideways a couple of meters from the shore, and crumbled ceilings. In others, men are painting the fences white or blue, or mixing concrete and pouring it into the cracks and holes, and in some, new sand or pebbles are poured in from small trucks. I realize that the beaches along this street mostly belong to this or that villa or hotel behind it. We might be able to walk through them now, but during the summer, there will be entrance fees.


           Interrupting this peaceful order is a giant hotel that somehow obstructs the view of the hill it leans on. We try to look inside through dimmed glass that covers all of its facade, but it's difficult to know what happened. The building looks closed, but also as if it was just used: there are white tablecloths on top of grape-coloured ones, and there are glasses and plates, but the chairs are all lined on top of each other in the back end of the room. The carpet seems to be vacuumed, but there are pieces of paper lying on it. Used glasses are piled on the bar and the sink. There are no signs of life on the hundreds of balconies, but when we look closer, some of them have the doors open, the curtain is blowing from them, and some have the window shades raised halfway. I try to climb one of the balconies and find an ashtray filled with cigarettes.


            A resort village a little bit further seems similarly empty. Here, white curtains, palm trees and low white canvas sofas and side tables surround shaded hideouts, lined around a path leading from the resort to the sandy beach.


           But all these spaces somehow give me the same feeling. In another, similar, giant hotel on the other side of that windy street along the coast, the empty outdoor Olympic swimming pool is full of graffiti, and its tiles are broken. But the entrance to the resort is grandiose, with heavy carpets, chandeliers, a bar and pillars in marble and brass, designer lamps in the corners, and a reception with bright painted wood. There is a single man in one of the leather separées in the large open space on the first floor, one of its walls a three story window full of plants. The shops in the lobby are closed, paper covering their glass walls and one has a sign saying 'the kiosk will not work, thank you’, but as we walk to the end of the first floor, we find ourselves on a concrete balcony with plastic chairs completely packed with hotel guests in robes, smoking and talking. Even in this off-season period, looking at this terrace, the hotel seems to be quite full.

          One day, we walk through a recently built marina town. I compare it in size and ambition with this health resort complex from the seventies. This one is completely new and I start imagining what that big hotel on the coast and the resort represented when they were built, and how the one we are walking through now will age. I remember its entrance like an entrance to a mansion - an iron gate, but it was probably a car ramp with a security guy in a kiosk. I remember fences, but were they erected around the whole property or only around the courtyards? As on the private beaches, until they are enforced, it is difficult to say. I remember the road decorated in patterns of light red and yellow. Golf course-like grass no one would dare to step or sit on. Villas and apartment buildings in white and uniformly designed with a hint of neo-classicism, but also decisively render-like contemporary. The streets are lined with airport-worthy shops, luxury brands only. There is background music everywhere too. Somewhere on the streets, speakers are built in, and they are triggered by sensors so that when you walk, you keep re-entering the same melody. I remember the streets empty and the building uninhabited, except for occasional visitors: graduates with their families in Viennese-ball gowns, who came to have their pictures taken against a generic backdrop. Noone seems to live here, and it also looks like it’s designed for short visits. I would call it a dip-in town. During the summer, do some people hang their towels over the balcony? Or grill their meat on the terrace? Are the now empty terraces filled with inflated swans and teenagers playing loud music and smoking? I find it hard to imagine any kind of expression of life here that wouldn’t be disturbing the purpose of this place: a restricted, contained, and serene life without disruptions.