A house from 1927, in the very heart of Ohrid, next to the municipal building - torn down by an excavator on a non-working day, before anyone could react. And now, with half a wall left of the original structure, every institution says the same thing: it's not our jurisdiction. A classic Balkan act in which everyone has a paper showing they acted within the law, and the building is gone.

The story is a textbook case of how heritage is lost when nobody is "responsible." The civic initiative "Ohrid SOS" filed a request for urgent temporary protection on May 29, after spotting an excavator in the yard. They described a valuable specimen of eclectic urban architecture from between the two world wars, with unique decorative elements preserved in small numbers not only in Ohrid but more widely in Macedonia. The request landed just before an extended weekend. The house fell before the weekend was out.

Everyone is responsible for nothing

The Directorate for Protection of Cultural Heritage replied that the building "has no protected-property status" and that it has no remit - the responsible body is the Ohrid Institute and Museum. The Institute, in turn, says the building did indeed have architectural value on its south facade and that they had planned to flag it for protection, but - "we learned about the demolition from the media." The request came late, they reacted late, and the old facade, they say, could and should have been built into the new structure, following the example of European cities.

And the Municipality of Ohrid? It's adamant that it acted "in line with all legal procedures." At the owner's request it issued a building permit under the 2008 Detailed Urban Plan and the Management Plan for the Ohrid Region, with all the necessary approvals. All by the book. All lawful. And yet - one building from 1927 is no more.

That's the whole tragedy packed into a single case. When a house sits in the buffer zone of Ohrid's Old Town Core - a protected UNESCO site - and can still be demolished over a weekend because nobody filed a paper in time, then the problem isn't one house. The problem is a system in which protection takes effect only after the excavator has already finished. How many such buildings will vanish while the institutions pass the ball to one another, each with a neatly signed document in hand?