The Ohrid bazaar turned into a river in a matter of minutes. A violent storm with pouring rain and strong winds hit the south-western parts of the country, leaving Ohrid and Struga without power for several hours and the historic old town centre under water.

The wind snapped the conductor cable on the power line between Ohrid and Struga, knocking out the electricity supply across a wider area. According to the operator, the fault occurred just as the 110-kilovolt line had anyway been switched off as planned for technical work to replace an optical cable - a coincidence of natural disaster and routine maintenance that made the outage worse.

A dozen streets in Ohrid were flooded, and the water running through the bazaar caught both merchants and passers-by off guard. The storm also hit the Debar-Kichevo and Polog regions, and there were flooding problems in Bitola too, where utility crews went out on the ground.

A scene we watch every summer in the Balkans - a few minutes of rain, and the city grinds to a halt. The question isn't whether there will be storms, but why the same streets turn into rivers every single time. When a bazaar survives for centuries but the drainage can't take one downpour, the problem isn't in the sky.