Eighteen fires in one day. Twenty in twenty-four hours. That figure comes from the Crisis Management Centre, not from an alarmist social media post. It's burning near Greshnica in Makedonski Brod, burning between Novo and Staro Konjarevo near Strumica, it burned at the landfill in Delchevo, near Padalishta in the Gostivar area, near Dolna Belica near Struga, near Blato and Vrbjani in Krivogashtani.

Read that list again. It isn't a list of fires - it's a map of the country. From Struga to Strumica, from Delchevo to Prilep, there's barely a region that doesn't appear in the daily report. Karposh, Petrovec, Butel, Bitola, Bogdanci, Kavadarci, Negotino, Vinica, Zrnovci, Lipkovo, Kratovo, Rankovce, Zhelino, Tearce.

What is actually burning

Most of the fires extinguished involved low vegetation, stubble fields, illegal dumps, scrub and rubbish heaps. This isn't a forest fire started by lightning. Stubble doesn't ignite on its own. An illegal dump doesn't spontaneously combust out of sheer beauty. These fires have a beginning, and that beginning is usually a person with a match who decided burning is faster than clearing.

The Crisis Management Centre appeals to citizens not to light fires in the open. The appeal is correct and useless - the same appeal repeats every summer, with the same result. If one behaviour repeats twenty times a day across the entire country, this is no longer a question of awareness. It's a question of penalties nobody ever sees.

Who was fined for burning stubble last year? How many misdemeanour proceedings ended with a fine actually collected? Those numbers aren't part of the Centre's daily report, and they are exactly the ones that would show whether the state is genuinely fighting the fires or only putting them out.

Firefighters go out twenty times a day in temperatures that are unbearable even without a fire. They are doing their job. The question is whether anyone is doing theirs before the ignition.