Thirty-three hours. That is how long the Bitola Territorial Fire Brigade's operation lasted - from 12 August at 3:30pm, when the first fire broke out in Makovo, to 1am on 14 August.

Between those two moments the fire moved through Graeshnica, Kukurechani, the Ergela area and Gneotino, and the hardest fight was in Ivanjevci, Novoselani and Loznani. The unit went out with every available resource. Overnight, crews arrived from the Kavadarci fire brigade, rapid response teams from the Protection and Rescue Directorate with four Pinzgauers, and villagers who turned up to fight the fire themselves.

And then comes the sentence that changes the whole story

The Bitola fire service announced that at every single location the fires were set deliberately.

Not the drought. Not the heat. Not glass in the sun. Someone lit them, at each of those places, within the same two days. When a fire brigade puts that in an official statement about every location it attended, it is not a hypothesis - it is a field assessment from the people who put the fires out.

Thirty-three hours of unbroken work means shifts that never changed over, vehicles that never cooled down, and a crew pulling water from 3:30 in the afternoon until after midnight the following day. This is not a natural disaster they are fighting. It is somebody's decision, repeated across several villages in three municipalities.

Makovo: the smoke you cannot approach

In Makovo the fire has been contained, but part of the terrain is still smoking - and that part cannot be fought like any other. It is an area holding explosive devices left over from the First World War.

Read that slowly. Someone set fire to ground with unexploded ordnance more than a century old lying underneath it, and firefighters now have to calculate how far in they are allowed to go. Pelagonia has carried that weight underground for a whole century, and in 2026 it gets activated because someone had a lighter to hand.

A thank-you note instead of an investigation

The Municipality of Bitola thanked the firefighters, the Protection and Rescue personnel and the residents. It is deserved - they saved the houses in Mogila and Novaci.

And then the municipality and the fire service appeal to citizens not to light fires in the open. An appeal, in a case where the brigade itself states that every fire was set deliberately.

The appeal is well aimed at people who drop embers through carelessness. Except arson is not carelessness, and an appeal is not a measure against it. The measure is a criminal complaint, an identified perpetrator and a court. That is the part nobody has announced - neither whether anything has been filed, nor whether anyone has been arrested over those locations.

The firefighters put in 33 hours. The question is who is going to put in the rest.