The fire that broke out in the area of the village of Makazi near Resen crossed the boundary of the "Pelister" National Park and took hold of the ground between the foot of the Vrtushka peak and the Mala Chuka peak. Parts of the pine plantations burned. And according to the head of the Protection and Rescue Directorate, Stojanche Angelov, the fire was most likely set deliberately.

The reason for that suspicion is concrete. Angelov said the fire in the Makazi area was spotted at at least two locations close to apple orchards. And while firefighters were trying to bring the blaze under control, another, longer line of fire appeared further away. A fire that shows up in several separate places is not the work of a sunbeam hitting glass.

From the outskirts to a protected area in a few hours

The fire broke out before 15:00 on the Prespa side, in the immediate vicinity of the park boundary. Within a short time it moved towards Pretor and towards Pelister, then crossed into the protected area. That is a speed that leaves the crews on the ground exactly one attempt.

Crews from the National Park took part in the response, along with fire units from Resen and Bitola, teams and air tractors from the Protection and Rescue Directorate, and machinery from Bitola's public utilities. Firebreaks were cut to stop the flames from advancing into the more densely forested sections. Park director Ivancho Toshevski confirmed the spread had been halted, but standby crews remain in the field because of the risk of reignition - especially given the strong wind.

What makes this story a hard one is not the fire itself but the context around it. In the previous twenty-four hours, 31 open-air fires were registered in Macedonia in total. By 13:00 the same day the Crisis Management Centre had registered another 10, seven of them active. The Makazi fire broke out later and did not enter that count at all.

Pelister is one of the country's three national parks. If something is deliberately set there, that is not a local incident - it is an attack on a protected area that takes decades to regrow and hours to burn. Angelov's assessment, delivered during the intervention, is not an officially established cause, and that is exactly the difference that will decide whether anyone answers for it or the case closes as "unknown cause".

A bigger disaster was averted, they say from the field, thanks to precise interventions from the air and quick action on the ground. That is true. But a system that works only because the crews arrived in time is not a prevention system - it is a reaction system, and the reaction gets more expensive every summer.