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Autumn, Firelight and the First Signs of Home

September brought a change of rhythm to Park Istra. The wet summer was ending, some volunteers were leaving, the kitchen moved into a tent, and the old house in Hrvoji was beginning to feel less like a ruin and more like a home.

There are moments in the life of a project when progress is not only measured by what has been built.

It is measured by atmosphere.

By the way people move through a place. By the sound of a guitar in the evening. By the first meal cooked somewhere safe from the rain. By the feeling of walking across a new floor and suddenly imagining the future more clearly.

In September 2014, Park Istra was still young. The house in Hrvoji was still being renovated, the routines were still improvised, and many things were far from finished. But something had shifted.

The building was no longer only a construction site.

It was slowly becoming a place where people lived.

September brings changes

The summer had been unusually wet. Rain shaped the days, interrupted work, softened paths, filled streams, and made daily life more complicated than anyone might have hoped.

Then September arrived.

With it came the feeling of transition. The worst of the wet summer was passing. The project received an event tent, and the kitchen was moved into it. It was a simple change, but for the volunteers it meant a lot.

A kitchen is never just a kitchen in a volunteer house.

It is the centre of daily life. It is where people meet in the morning before work, where plans are discussed, where someone is always looking for coffee, salt, a spoon, or a clean pan. It is where tired people become human again after a long day.

Moving the kitchen into the tent meant that bad weather no longer had the same power over the group. Meals could continue. Conversations could continue. The small domestic life of the project could continue.

Park Istra was still rough, but it was learning how to shelter people.

The sadness of departures

September also meant goodbyes.

Some volunteers who had spent much of the summer in Hrvoji returned home. In a volunteer community, departures always carry mixed feelings. There is happiness for the time shared, gratitude for everything learned from one another, and a quiet sadness because nobody knows whether the same group will ever meet again.

That is one of the strange beauties of temporary communities.

They become close quickly, because everyday life is shared so fully. People work together, eat together, get tired together, laugh together, complain together, discover places together, and learn each other’s habits in a very short time.

Then, suddenly, someone leaves.

A bed becomes empty. A voice is missing at dinner. A joke loses the person who always understood it first. The project continues, but the atmosphere changes slightly.

Park Istra has always been shaped by this movement: arrivals and departures, new faces and returning friends, people who stay for days and people who become part of the story for much longer than planned.

Old roof tiles, new floors

Meanwhile, work on the house continued.

On the ground floor, the floor was being prepared for the laying of “planetke”: old terracotta tiles that had been removed from the previous roof.

This detail carries the spirit of Park Istra beautifully.

The old roof did not simply become waste. Part of it was given a new role. What had once protected the building from above would now become the floor beneath people’s feet.

Reuse was not a decorative idea. It was practical, ecological and deeply connected to the character of the building. The house was not being erased and replaced. It was being transformed through the materials it already carried.

The roof itself had already been covered with new traditional clay tiles. A group of volunteers laid them in only a few days, working with songs and laughter. Later, a master roofer came to inspect the work and praised it highly. He said many professional builders would not have done it so precisely.

For a young project built largely through volunteer energy, that kind of recognition mattered.

It showed that when people are guided carefully, when they work with attention and pride, volunteer work can be not only generous, but also excellent.

Light wood and grey Istrian stone

Inside the house, the first floor was also changing.

A wooden floor was halfway finished, and the combination of light wood with grey Istrian stone created a feeling that was fresh, soft and bright.

This was one of those moments when a renovation begins to feel emotionally different.

Before, the building might still have looked like work. Like dust. Like effort. Like a long list of tasks.

But with the new floor, people could begin to imagine rooms, gatherings, rest, winter evenings, future volunteers, shared talks, and quiet moments after work.

The ruin was becoming welcoming.

The new floor was tested in the most human way possible: everyone gathered in the newly formed space and watched a film. It was the first film of that wet summer.

It was not a grand event. But in the life of a place being rebuilt, small firsts matter.

The first film. The first meal in a protected kitchen. The first evening when a room feels like a room. The first time people sit somewhere and do not only see what is missing, but what is beginning.

Evenings by the fire

Most evenings, however, were spent by the fire.

Sometimes the group was talkative and laughing. Other evenings were quieter. After a day of work, not every silence needs to be filled. People sat together, rested, watched the flames, listened, and let the day settle.

Often someone picked up a guitar, and people sang.

In the original note, there is a small sentence that says a lot: they did not miss television.

That line captures the early life of Park Istra perfectly.

Entertainment was not something consumed from a screen. It came from the people present. From stories, music, shared fatigue, jokes, food, firelight, and the simple fact of being together in a place that asked something from everyone.

This kind of evening cannot be planned too much. It happens when the conditions are right: enough work to make rest meaningful, enough people to create warmth, enough simplicity to make ordinary things feel rich.

Days outside the work

Even in the middle of renovation, the days were not only about building.

Volunteers regularly explored the waterfalls, forest paths and climbing areas around Hrvoji. They picked blackberries. They gathered figs. They discovered the land through movement, weather, taste and curiosity.

This mattered because Park Istra was never just a place where volunteers came to complete tasks.

It was also a place where they learned to belong to a landscape.

The waterfalls, the paths, the fruit, the stone villages, the wet summer and the warm evenings all became part of the education. Volunteers came to understand Istria not only through information, but through daily contact.

They worked on the house, but the region worked on them too.

A fig picked from a tree, a walk to a waterfall, a song by the fire, a film on a new floor — these were not separate from the project. They were part of what made the project meaningful.

The beginning of home

Looking back, September 2014 feels like a threshold.

Park Istra was still unfinished, but it was no longer only an idea. It had routines, memories, jokes, departures, meals, work rhythms, favourite places, and evenings that people would remember.

The building was becoming softer.

The community was becoming deeper.

The old house was still in progress, but the feeling of home had already begun.

A home is not made only by walls, floors and roofs. It is made by repeated gestures: cooking, cleaning, repairing, returning, singing, sharing, leaving, arriving, caring.

In Hrvoji, those gestures were already happening.

The volunteers were laying floors, but also building trust. They were protecting themselves from rain, but also learning how to live together. They were saying goodbye to summer friends, but also preparing the space for those who would come next.

The original diary note ends simply: “It is beautiful for us.”

That simplicity says enough.

The project was hard, unfinished and uncertain. But it was alive. It was full of work, friendship, nature, firelight and song.

And slowly, almost quietly, Park Istra was becoming home.