Macedonia burned in 21 places at once yesterday. Not ten, not fifteen - twenty-one active open-air fires, which according to the Crisis Management Centre is the highest number recorded in a single day this season. „Today we have a record number of fires for this summer”, said the centre's director, Muhamed Ali. A record nobody wanted to break.

The worst front is above Studeničani. The fire that started in the area of the village of Morane spread towards Ramni Gaber and was still burning through the night. The head of the Protection and Rescue Directorate, Stojanče Angelov, said the thing firefighters know from experience: „The fire is not out. The fire line is very long.” A long line means a lot of people at a lot of points at the same time - and that is precisely the resource that runs out fastest.

The plan for the morning is classic and logical: ground crews first, then the directorate's three air tractors once conditions allow. The early hours are the only window in which you can attack a fire before the daytime heat and the wind feed it again. That is not a tactical preference - it is an admission that by the afternoon the fight is close to lost before it starts.

Through the night the crews stayed in and around the village of Gaber. The centre said the goal was to keep the fire away from inhabited areas. Skopje's fire brigade took part, along with directorate crews and four Pinzgauer vehicles. Four vehicles. That is the number defending a village against a fire line running for kilometres.

The list of municipalities that burned yesterday reads like the geography of the entire country: Makedonski Brod, Želino, Studeničani, Ilinden, Zelenikovo, Kičevo, Debarca, Jegunovce, Tetovo, Tearce, Gostivar, Prilep, Novaci, Štip, Bitola, Centar Župa. And in Skopje itself - by the polyclinic in Čair and by the railway station in Đorče Petrov. Fires are no longer an event in some distant village; they have a city address.

Which brings the question that gets asked every summer and every summer goes unanswered. Some of these fires were set deliberately. The rest are the product of terrain nobody has cleared in decades, firebreaks that exist on paper, and an air fleet you can count on the fingers of one hand. Three air tractors for a country burning in twenty-one places - that is not bad luck, that is a budget decision taken long before the first flame.

Morning over Ramni Gaber will show whether holding the line overnight was worth it. But even the best morning does not change the reckoning that becomes unavoidable in September: how many hectares burned, how many of them did not have to, and who is going to write that report.