The warning could not be starker. Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine (“If you see me, then weep”), reads the grim inscription on a rock in the Elbe River near the northern Czech town of Děčín, close to the German border.
As Europe’s rivers run dry in a devastating drought that scientists say could prove the worst in 500 years, their receding waters are revealing long-hidden artefacts, from Roman camps to ghost villages and second world war shipwrecks.
The so-called “hunger stone” at Děčín is one of dozens in central European rivers engraved to mark their levels during historic droughts – and warn future generations of the famine and hardship likely to follow each time they became visible.
Czech researchers in 2013 described the stone as “chiselled with the years of hardship and the initials of authors lost to history”, saying it “expressed that drought had brought a bad harvest, lack of food, high prices and hunger for poor people.”
The earliest readable year on the Děčín stone is 1616. Traces of inscriptions relating to much earlier droughts, including 1417 and 1473, have been largely eroded over time. Ten later dry years, between 1707 and 1893, are also recorded.
Stern reminders of drought’s grim consequences, most hunger stones are found on the Elbe, which flows from the north of what is now the Czech Republic through former Bohemia and then Germany before reaching the North Sea near Hamburg. Others appear on the Rhine, Danube and Moselle.
One, near Bleckede in Germany, reads: “When this goes under, life will become more colourful again”. The Elbe stones in particular have appeared more regularly – notably during the central European drought of 2018 – since a dam was built in the 1920s.
But they are far from the only archaeological artefacts to have seen the light of day once more in this year’s drought.
Italy’s longest river, the parched Po, whose water level is at a 70-year low, has yielded the remains of an ancient hamlet in Piedmont. More recent relics to emerge from the river include the wreck of the Zibello, a 50-metre cargo barge sunk during the second world war, a Nazi military vehicle and, near Mantua, a 450kg (1,000lb) bomb, whose discovery and detonation required the evacuation of more than 3,000 people from their homes.
In Lombardy, timber building foundations dating back to the bronze age have risen from the bed of the River Oglio, while the 100,000-year-old skull of a deer and the remains of hyenas, lions and rhinos have appeared on dried-out parts of Lake Como.
In Rome, the receding Tiber has revealed the ruins of a bridge believed to have been built during the first century for the emperor Nero so he could more easily visit his possessions on the right bank of the river, including the villa of his mother, Agrippina.
