The Danube is giving back what Europe left at the bottom.
Near Prahovo, Serbia, the river has fallen low enough to expose the wrecks of German ships sunk in 1944, during the retreat of Nazi Germany. For more than eighty years, they lay hidden beneath the water. Now, as heat and drought draw the Danube back, they have returned to view.
It is an unsettling image: climate change is physically exposing a piece of Europe’s history at the same time that it may be bringing back, in another form, some of the conditions that history taught Europe to fear.
Climate change does not produce fascism. Poverty does not automatically turn people into extremists. But crises alter the ground on which a society stands.
A drought may begin as a problem for farmers and become a problem for shipping, energy, food prices. An environmental problem becomes an economic one. The economic becomes social. The social can become political.
Climate change may not create new fears so much as deepen the ones that are already there.
For decades, Europe built much of its stability around a simple promise: the future would be better than the past. Richer, safer, more open.
That promise has become harder to keep.
When the future begins to look poorer than the past, old fears can find an audience again.
Perhaps the mistake was to think that certain things belonged to the past.
Fear, the need to feel safe, the desire to find someone to blame: none of them has a date.
The eras change. The words change.
The Danube recedes, and something rises with it.
Perhaps history had never disappeared.
It was only underwater.
(Cover image edited using artificial intelligence)
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Eirini Lavrentiadou is an actress and singer, born in Thessaloniki in 1992. She lives in Florence, where she trained at the city’s Theatre Academy and the Fiesole School of Music. She has performed in classical Greek and European plays, worked with international directors and companies, and appeared in concerts ranging from opera to jazz. She contributes to Florence Daily News as a writer.
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