Over 4,000 Bombs Next to the Houses Below Tumbe Kafe, and the State Has Just Two Employed Bomb Disposal Experts

The First World War ended in 1918. In Bitola, the digging continues. In the old barracks below Tumbe Kafe, more than 1,700 hand grenades and rifle grenades have been pulled out in recent days, taking the total at that site past 4,000. According to the director of the Protection and Rescue Directorate, Stojanče Angelov, the nearest houses are 200 metres away as the crow flies.

Angelov expects more than 1,000 further bombs and other unexploded ordnance. And that's not the only place. According to him, there are several more critical sites around Bitola with reports of hundreds, and in some places thousands, of devices. In 2020, near the stadium, around 12,000 artillery shells were found. These two sites alone account for over 16,000 explosive devices in six years, and there's no complete public record of what has been found since 1918.

Who's clearing all this?

This is where the story stops being history. Macedonia has only two professionally employed bomb disposal experts left, who have to cover the entire country. In the spring operation the bombs were pulled out by Bitola's bomb disposal expert Gjorgji Stefanov, alone. Now he's being helped by three Interior Ministry pensioners, two former members of the "Tigers" unit and one from the Anti-Terrorism Section, hired on service contracts.

Angelov says one more expert is being hired and that he expects them before New Year. There are no ready-made staff anywhere, he says, and young people have to go through three-stage training lasting at least a year and a half. Under changes to the Law on Protection and Rescue, the pensioners can be engaged for about another ten years.

So one of the most dangerous trades in the country hangs on a few people and the goodwill of pensioners. For bombs that have been lying there since 1918. Why does training new experts only start once the old ones are leaving?

Bitola was under artillery fire for almost two years, and today families live above that ground. Angelov urges citizens not to touch anything that looks like a bomb, shell or projectile and to call 112 at once. They look old and rusty, he says, but they are extremely dangerous and can go off on impact. In Bitola that isn't a metaphor for the past. It's an instruction for digging foundations.