More than 41 registered open fires in a single day. A fire line over five kilometres long above the village of Gračani, having crossed the border from the Kosovo side. An army helicopter between Struga and Debar. And near Selce, outside Štip, three people caught stealing wood while hundreds fight the flames on the other side of the tarmac.

The fire that came from the other side of the border

Stojanče Angelov, head of the Protection and Rescue Directorate, said that during the night a serious fire crossed from the Kosovo side into Macedonia towards the village of Gračani, with a fire line more than five kilometres long. Two of the directorate's air tractors worked above the village, supporting firefighters from the Skopje city fire brigade.

The Skopje firefighters managed to halt the fire line and stop it entering the village. The air tractors were decisive for the spots the ground crews could not reach.

A fire crossing a state border does not ask whose forest it is. When that happens, the coordination channel between the two sides is what decides how early anyone reacts - and about that channel not one institution says anything, beyond that the fire "crossed over".

Štip: partial control, one critical arm

The fire between the Štip villages of Puhče and Selce has been brought under partial control, after weekend houses were saved from burning the night before. Blagoj Rendžov, commander of the Štip fire brigade, says one critical arm still remains towards the village of Selce on Mount Serta, and he hopes the weather will hold.

There are hundreds of people on the ground - from Štip, Strumica, Sveti Nikole, Kavadarci, Kočani, Berovo and other towns. Firefighters, the services, machinery and ordinary citizens.

Three timber thieves on the other side of the road

Precisely while those hundreds were fighting the fire, three timber thieves were caught near the fire zone. Kire Mihailov, deputy director of the National Forests public enterprise, described the scene: on one side of the Štip-Radoviš expressway, people from half of eastern Macedonia are battling the flames; on the other, some residents of Štip are stealing wood.

"We caught them, but the shame stays as a mark," Mihailov wrote. He also mentioned two people detained on suspicion of starting a fire near Selce.

The question that arrives once the fire is out

This is the part that usually does not make the news, and it is the most expensive. When the flames die down, what is left is thousands of burnt trunks and scorched ground that needs years to recover. Burnt timber has a market value.

The DOM party is calling for burnt forests not to become a new earning opportunity - for commercial logging on burnt areas to be legally restricted, for clear rules on issuing permits to remove timber, and for the National Forests enterprise to be the sole direct body responsible for restoring state forests.

That is a party proposal and should be read as one. But the question underneath it is not party-political: who issues the permits to log a burnt forest, by what criteria, and how many such permits were issued after the fires of previous summers. Those are data held by the National Forests enterprise, and none of them asks anyone to take anything on trust - only to be published.