The road to Teferič cracked open in February - just five months after it had been repaired at the end of September 2025. In March it took further damage. Today the site looks frightening: Mariovska Street, along a stretch of some seventy metres, is sliding downhill, and the hole gets bigger by the day.

Five months from fresh asphalt to a landslide. That is the shelf life.

Now, five months after it split open, the first genuinely concrete measure has arrived: at a government session a decision was passed handing the entire project to the Ministry of Transport and Communications.

The explanation that says more than it means to

Transport and Communications Minister Aleksandar Nikoloski was blunt about the reason: „The road to Teferič is one big, exceptionally serious problem, bearing in mind that we are dealing with a serious landslide. The scale of it far exceeds the means and the capacity that the Municipality of Kisela Voda and the City of Skopje have.“

So the state is admitting that the capital city and one of its largest municipalities do not have the capacity to fix a landslide on seventy metres of road. Not a motorway through a mountain - seventy metres of municipal street.

That is a sentence worth framing. Not because of Nikoloski, who simply said out loud what everyone has been staring at for months, but because it describes the state of local government more precisely than any report could.

What the municipality did in the meantime

From February to July, the only thing the Municipality managed to do about this problem was to pile up dirt and hay in an attempt to stop traffic on the dangerous stretch.

Dirt and hay. Five months. Against a landslide that the Faculty of Civil Engineering, in its report and expert opinion, assessed as an aggressive slide with a tendency to spread - which is exactly what it did.

Vehicles are banned from the road, but judging by the picture on the ground it is not safe for pedestrians either. And the landslide sits at roughly 85 metres of elevation above the addiction treatment centre in Kisela Voda.

Who is left without a road

This road is not a shortcut for a handful of people. It is used by the residents of Sopište and Gorno and Dolno Sonje - a key link for a large population and for the vehicles that move through there daily. Those five months, they were not reading reports. They were driving the long way around.

The deadlines, so we have something to ask about

Nikoloski announced that a stabilisation and remediation project has already been drawn up, and that he expects the contractor tender to be published as soon as next week. The contractor should be selected within 30 to 45 days of the procedure closing, and the remediation is meant to be finished before winter sets in.

Those are concrete deadlines and that is a good thing - concrete deadlines are the only thing anyone can check later.

So write them down: tender - next week. Contractor - within a month to a month and a half. Finished road - before winter.

The previous asphalt lasted five months. This time the project includes stabilising the landslide itself, which is the difference between fixing the symptom and fixing the cause. If this remediation too turns out to be just a new layer on top of moving earth, come February we will be reading again that the scale of the problem exceeds somebody's capacity.