The "hunger stones" have surfaced again in the beds of the Rhine and the Elbe. It isn't a metaphor and it isn't a new phenomenon - these are real blocks of stone with carved markings, left by people who in past centuries recorded the worst droughts. When the water drops far enough for the stones to show, it means the river has already passed what people considered normal.

The same picture has been recorded in many rivers in the eastern German state of Saxony after water levels fell, the German newspaper Die Zeit reported. One such stone sits beside the Elbe near Pirna.

One of the blocks has more than twenty dates carved into it. The span covers over three centuries, and the last year recorded is 2018. It is a message in the most direct form possible: somebody in the seventeenth century bent over a dry river stone and chiselled a date so that whoever came after would know. Not for an archive, not for statistics. As a warning.

The river that was always there

The Rhine isn't a tourist attraction - it is a transport artery. Fuel, grain and raw materials for German industry move along it. When the level falls, barges load less or don't sail at all. Germany has known this bill since 2018, the year that very stone recorded.

And here? In the Balkans we don't need carved stones to know that the summers are changing - it's enough to look at which riverbed is a meadow this year. The difference is that the Germans have a three-hundred-year written record of their droughts. We have grandfathers' memories and not one chiselled stone.

These stones have surfaced before in other dried-up European rivers. Every time they do, the same cycle follows: pictures, astonishment, a few weeks of concern, then rain - and forgetting until next time. The question isn't whether the stones will appear again. The question is whether anyone actually reads what is carved on them.