Shock - Zagreb - city that needs our love

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It is hard to decide which one of these photos with a human face could sum up all the consequences of the earthquake and the direct shock we experienced in the following hours. Is it the photograph of an elderly lady on a park bench who wrapped her two little dogs in yellow blankets, beside her a walking stick, which she had to rely on while heading to that bench? The lady and the dogs are equally frightened. Or, perhaps, the photo of a woman in a wheelchair, again with a small dog, French bulldog? In the background, several heavily damaged cars in Đorđićeva Street, one of those that suffered the most in the earthquake.

Virtually on the same spot, our photographers took a picture of a young woman, fear in her eyes clearly showing behind the glasses. The faces of the earthquake are also those of new mothers in Petrova Street, covered by blankets on that, as we all remember, very chilly day. Those are the faces of the passers-by on Zagreb streets after the earthquake, trying not to look at the huge capital of a column in the middle of the road and trying not to imagine what would have happened if someone had been walking on the street at the exact moment when it fell. Or the faces of people skipping over the bricks in the middle of the tram tracks in the city’s center.

It is a face of Zagreb that we, who experienced the earthquake, will remember for the rest of our lives, and these photos, taken on the spot with the perfect instinct of experienced photojournalists, will enable the coming generations to remember it as well. Just like we visualize the 1880 earthquake today through the photographs signed by Ivan Standl, one of Zagreb’s first photographers, but also through the sentence of writer August Šenoa: “Never have I seen a more horrible image, never have I sensed deeper sorrow in my lifetime.”