The Institute of Public Health has published its annual report assessing the quality and safety of surface bathing waters. The conclusion comes in two chapters that refuse to look each other in the eye.

Chapter one: the water of Lake Ohrid is safe for swimming. Lab analyses of samples taken between 20 May and 24 June place it in the first class, and most beaches are rated „excellent”.

Chapter two: into that very same lake, in certain places, raw sewage flows directly.

The list the Institute wrote down in black and white

To protect the lake, a collector system was built to gather waste water from Ohrid and Struga and carry it to the treatment plant in the village of Vranishta. The system exists. The problem is who is not connected to it.

According to the report, the hotels, restaurants and tourist settlements along the entire shoreline remain unconnected - from the „Desaret” hotel down to Sveti Naum, and from Struga to the village of Radozhda. Along that whole stretch, the single connected property is the „Makpetrol” hotel. One. The remaining private houses along the shore, along with the villages of Trpejca, Ljubanishta and Radozhda, use septic pits.

And on Radozhda the report is mercilessly precise: the septic pits from the houses either empty straight into the lake, or - being right on the beach itself - seep into it. Not „a risk of”. Not „potentially”. Direct polluters, the document says.

Sveti Naum: a 2013 system that doesn't work

The most glaring case is Sveti Naum. The sewer system there was built back in 2013. Thirteen years on, it does not provide full treatment: all that works is a grinder for the sewage, with no filters and no chlorination before it is discharged into the lake.

A grinder. Meaning the contents get chopped up and go into the lake. That is the entirety of the „treatment” at one of the most visited sites in the country.

Also polluting: the bars set up directly on the beaches, the swimming pools attached to the restaurants, and the storm-water outflow pipes into which - as the Institute writes - sewage discharges have been connected, deliberately or otherwise.

Where the water no longer passes the test

The results are not the same everywhere. At the Grashnica measuring point, where a storm-water outflow sits, the quality is rated third class and fails the microbiological criteria. At the „Royal” hotel, at Labino and at the Studenchishta canal the water rates „good” instead of „excellent”.

These are not random dots on a map. They are precisely the places where the report had already listed an outflow, a bar or an unconnected property. The result follows the cause like thread through a needle.

The message everyone reads wrong

The Institute recommends urgently fixing the defects in the existing collector system and connecting the properties still not tied in. That is a recommendation, not a solution - recommendations get written every single year.

The headline the public will remember is „safe for swimming”. That is accurate, and it's good that it's accurate. But „safe for swimming today” and „the lake is clean” are not the same sentence, and the gap between them is called thirteen years of a grinder with no filter.

Lake Ohrid is UNESCO-protected and is the greatest natural asset this country owns. It isn't being poisoned out of malice - it's being poisoned by a connection nobody made and a project nobody finished. How many more years of „safe for swimming” do we need before we stop reading that phrase as permission to do nothing?