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Most large European cities stand on a river, assuring them quick transport and movement and also a supply of water. Yet there are some cities that cover up their rivers – that have them intermittently or have hidden them in underground channels. This book is a peculiar type of monograph on the rivers that have disappeared from modern maps and the consciousness of locals.

Maciej Robert’s essayistic and journalistic inquiries are grounded in his home city of Łódź, which owes its name to the Łódka, a small river, twenty kilometres long, concealed under the city’s streets. Many of Łódź’s citizens don’t even know the river exists, just as people in Lviv forget the Poltva, which has flowed in underground sewers since the nineteenth century.

An equally sad fate met the Rokytka, which flows through Prague, and about which Bohumil Hrabal wrote. The Rokytka, like many other smaller rivers, disappeared under heaps of trash and pollution, which often built up due to folk practices and superstitions, such as drowning effigies or casting into the water objects that collect evil forces.

Maciej Robert’s lyrical prose not only wanders on the trail of forgotten rivers annihilated by human beings, but also meanders through European literature. Traces of rivers lost to today’s maps still survive in the work of writers like Olga Tokarczuk, Jonathan Swift, Yurii Andrukhovych or Karl-Markus Gauss. Supplementing his literary impressions with hydrological, geological and geographical facts makes Robert’s work of reportage an original guidebook to tracking down the mythical rivers of Europe.