The Eridanos River is an ancient watercourse imagined beneath modern Athens, its buried flow surfacing in Sofia Papastergiadis’s uncertain dream as a connection between the city’s layered past and the human labor organized around water. Though absent from the visible streets, it becomes perceptible through sound and remembered geography.

Course and Setting

In Sofia’s account, the river once flowed through ancient Athens north of the Acropolis. By the time of the narrative, it is buried beneath asphalt streets and modern buildings. The contrast between a flowing river and the built-over city gives the Eridanos a hidden presence: its course persists in the landscape’s history even where the surface conceals it.

Appearance in Sofia’s Dream

The river comes to mind after Sofia spends a day in the anthropology museum and walks to the Acropolis, where she sleeps in the temple’s shadow. She thinks she might have dreamed of the Eridanos. In that uncertain vision, she hears the pull of its current as it moves toward water fountains where enslaved women wait to fill jars balanced on their heads. The scene joins the river’s physical course to the bodies and work that depended on its water.

Water, Labor, and Memory

The image makes the Eridanos more than a remnant of ancient geography. Its unseen current leads toward a scene of women waiting, carrying, and supplying water, while the present-day city has paved over the river itself. Elsewhere in Sofia’s life, water is an everyday caregiving problem: Rose asks for it, and Sofia tries different bottles and temperatures to find the right kind. Against that intimate routine, the dream’s fountains give water a longer history of need and labor. The river’s brief appearance thus brings ancient and contemporary Athens into the same submerged landscape, while preserving the uncertainty of a memory that Sofia can only identify as a possible dream.