From the Danube and the Sava to the Vistula, this course traces how rivers shaped Eastern Europe from the High Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. It offers a historical overview of the region’s most significant waterways. The course explores the environment and human interactions with animals, climate, geography, and disease across the river valleys. It demonstrates the connection between rivers and urban space and their significance for the development of cities. Moving beyond the city-centered story, we highlight villages and rural economies that depended on rivers as much as urban centers did. Students will analyze rivers’ significance as international trade networks that operated as hubs for cultural and social exchange. We will also examine rivers’ roles as borders, challenging the dominant narrative that reduces them to lines between “civilizations,” and we will trace how these waterways served as routes for the movement of goods, commodities, and knowledge. Course learning outcomes: 1. Analyze how major Eastern European rivers influenced urban form, rural economies, animal life, and the environment. 2. Interpret primary sources 3. Improve the ability to think critically and argue effectively about borders, imaginative geographies and the “Orient.”