Summer in Macedonia increasingly begins not with the calendar but with smoke on the horizon. In a single day the east of the country burned in several places at once, and the image has become uncomfortably familiar: parched land, wind, and a fire that runs faster than any fire engine.

According to the Crisis Management Centre, by the afternoon three active fires had been registered on open ground - near the Probištip village of Neokazi, in the central urban area of "Isar" in Štip, and near the village of Novoselani in the municipality of Češinovo-Obleševo. The Štip fire was especially alarming precisely because it broke out in the centre of the city. Fire crews were sent to all three locations.

But the real damage had already been done the day before. The large fire that raged through the fields of the Probištip villages of Neokazi, Bučište and Ratavica burned orchards, grain crops, vineyards, beehives and a house. This is not "low vegetation" and statistics - these are people whose entire year of work vanished in a few hours, with no guarantee that anyone will compensate them.

And here comes the question that repeats every summer without an answer. Fires are no surprise - every dry day and every weather forecast announces them. So why does the system react every year as if something new has caught it out? Where are the preventive firebreaks, the clearing of the terrain, the monitoring of high-risk fields before, and not after, they go up in flames?

The fragility of summer safety is not a natural disaster - it is a choice. Nature just waits for a dry day and a bit of wind. Everything else - the readiness, the prevention, the speed of the response - is up to us. And until that is taken seriously, every summer will bring the same smoke and the same burned vineyards, with different village names.