In Ljubojno today they buried a man who for four months went out to protest every single day to stop the logging in the monastery forest above the village. Vasko Tomulevski was 44. He died on 9 August riding a motorcycle - he lost control and went off the road.

People in Prespa called him the "Soul of Ljubojno". That isn't a phrase from an obituary, it is the description of a role no body in this country provides for - a man trying to keep a village from dying.

A shop, a restaurant and four months of protest

For years he ran the shop and the restaurant in the middle of the village. It was the main gathering point not only for Ljubojno but for all of Prespa - villagers, visitors and passers-by met there. He organised events, parties, gatherings, environmental actions. The goal was simple and hard: that Ljubojno should not become another Macedonian village slowly emptying out.

When plans appeared for large-scale logging in the monastery forest, Tomulevski was part of the group "We All Love Ljubojno". They protested every day, for four months. And they won - the logging was stopped and the village spared erosion, flooding and everything that comes with bare hills above houses.

Note who stopped that logging. Not an inspectorate. Not a ministry. Not a sustainable forestry strategy. A group of villagers with T-shirts and the stubbornness to show up every day for four months.

The man who opened Prespa up to journalists

Tomulevski was also the main line of communication between news crews and Prespa. There was nothing he didn't know about the area, and he initiated efforts himself to get Ljubojno written and talked about in the media. That is a thankless role - being the unpaid press office of your own village because the institutions don't answer the phone.

He dreamed of the opening of the Markova Noga - Lemos border crossing, expecting it to bring a tourist impulse and revive Prespa. That crossing has been a subject of announcements and postponements for decades.

"With my friend Vasko Tomulevski - the Soul of Ljubojno - we dreamed of the day when borders would no longer separate us. Of the day when people from all three sides could freely meet, cooperate, create and share the beauty and richness of this unique place," wrote his friend, a tourism worker, after news of the death.

What remains

Macedonia has hundreds of villages with a few dozen residents each and one such man in each - the one who, when everyone else left, stayed and fought windmills. Those people are in no budget, they get no awards, and when they are gone the village feels it immediately.

The forest above Ljubojno is still there because a group of people held out for four months. The question for Prespa now is whether that stubbornness was something the village had, or something one man was carrying.