Between seven and ten thousand sheep have died of sheep pox. That is the estimate of the breeders themselves, presented at a press conference ahead of a meeting in Shtip where they will decide which demands to put to the government and the Agriculture Ministry.

But the number, says Naser Xhemaili, president of the Union of Sheep and Goat Breeders, is incomplete - and the reason it is incomplete is heavier than the number itself.

"We already know the figure is between seven and ten thousand sheep, but it is not complete. We certainly have more flocks lost, we can see that farmers are now afraid to report cases, because a lot of time passes before the flock is destroyed and they do not know, they are not sure, whether they will be compensated for those flocks," Xhemaili said.

Read that sentence again. Farmers are afraid to report a disease in their own flock - not afraid of the disease, but of the procedure that follows the report.

The vaccine that is "coming in ten days"

Asked when the vaccines from Turkey announced by the Food and Veterinary Agency and the ministry would arrive, Xhemaili said they have had no information at all so far.

"They told us we would have the vaccine in 10 days, and still there is none. And it is already too late for vaccination anyway. In the eastern part they can no longer be vaccinated, because the disease has reached all of them," he says.

That is the end of the vaccination story in eastern Macedonia. Not because it was refused, but because it arrived later than the disease.

Xhemaili confirms that some farmers vaccinated using illegally obtained vaccines from Turkey. When the institution is late, a man with a flock does not wait - he gets what he needs however he can. This is not a defence of illegal imports; it is a description of what happens when the official channel is slower than the infection.

What they are asking for

The demand is simple: compensation for every dead sheep, in writing, based on the flock-size data the institutions already hold. Subsidies and compensation to be paid out according to that figure.

The farmers announced that if the authorities will not listen, they will go to the government building - with their sheep. They also received backing from the Confederation of Trade Union Organisations, whose representative Goce Delchev Todev addressed the prime minister directly: "Prime minister, as urgently as possible, take this into your own hands, because the flocks are waiting."

Milena Velichkovikj, a breeder and board member of the Union, put the whole point into a single sentence: "The first and basic mission of the Union is to increase the livestock fund, not to reduce it."

Sheep farming in eastern Macedonia is not built in one season. A flock of a hundred head is the result of years of selection and work. When it disappears in a few weeks, what is lost is not only livestock - it is a craft passed down through generations in those villages. The question for the institutions is not whether they will pay, but whether they will pay while there is still something left to save.