Servicing the Vodno cable car will cost 350,000 euros and is meant to be done by September. The money comes from the City of Skopje's budget rebalance, and the work is supposed to fix „all the shortcomings piled up over the years“.

And that „over the years“ is the whole point. The cable car has been out of service for two months for safety reasons - there was a risk of a gondola failure. Built by Austria's „Doppelmayr“, it opened in 2011, cost 6.7 million euros and has 28 cabins. Fifteen years on, the bill for neglected maintenance arrives all at once.

The tender for a contractor should be published by the end of the week. Until then, Skopje's favorite outing up Vodno stays shut in the middle of summer - exactly when it's needed most.

Three hundred and fifty thousand euros for something that hasn't been seriously maintained in fifteen years is a classic Balkan model: build it with fanfare, open it with a ribbon, then leave it to fall apart until it gets dangerous. Routine maintenance is boring and doesn't make for photo ops - but it's incomparably cheaper than the big repair that always shows up at the end. The question is whether this service will be followed by a maintenance plan, or just a countdown to the next breakdown.