Crusader Toilets
What today is the harbor in the Turkish town of Bodrum had been a fortification as far back as Doric times, around 1110 BC, and was the site of the palace of King Mausulos. His enormous tomb, completed in 353 BC, is the source of our word "Mausoleum". Back then the city was known as Halicarnassus.
Tamerlane invaded Anatolia in 1402 AD, reducing the control of the Ottoman Empire over south-western Anatolia. The Knights Hospitalier, also known as the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, built the Castle of Saint Peter at Halicarnassus, by then known as Bodrum, as it is today. These are the toilets.
The Knights were facing an invasion by the Seljuk Turks. The Knights' headquarters was on Rhodes, and they needed a fortified base north of there and on the mainland.
The Knights had a castle on the island of Kos, just across a narrow straight from Halicarnassus. The castle construction started in 1402. There had been a fortification there back in Doric times, around 1110 BC, and a small Seljuk fortress from the 1000s. A papal decree in 1409 guaranteed a reservation in Heaven for all the construction workers. By 1437 they had completed the outer wall.
Seige warfare had been common since ancient times. The limiting factor in a seige is drinking water. The Knights included fourteen cisterns for collecting rainwater in their castle.
Various extensions and reconstructions continued for at least a century. In the early 1500s the Tomb of King Mausulos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was finally disassembled in the quest to fortify the castle. Its stones had been used in the initial construction, and by 1522 the last of them were used.
The castle fell to Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522. The knights withdrew to Malta, and the Ottoman Empire took control of Bodrum and the Castle of Saint Peter. It was used as a military base by the Turks through the 1800s. It was a Turkish army base in 1824 during the Greek Revolt. In 1895 it was converted into a prison.
It was an Italian garrison 1917-1921, but the Italians withdrew when Atatürk came to power. It stood empty for 40 years, becoming the Museum of Underwater Archaeology in 1962.
Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is a fascinating description of sanitation conditions around the world. "2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. [....] Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box."
In September 2009, Morna Gregory and Sian James published a book titled Toilets of the World. It's pretty much the same theme that you find here — photographs and commentary on other people's plumbing.
The Porcelain God: A Social History of the Toilet, by Julie Horan, contends that civilization began with the toilet.
Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, edited by Laura Noren and Harvey Molotch, has essays by anthropologists, sociologists, and architects on the importance of the toilet, especially for urban dwellers.
Latrinae Et Foricae: Toilets in the Roman World describes the toilets of the Roman Empire from Iberia to Syria, and from North Africa to Hadrian's Wall in Britannia.
Toilets, Bathtubs, Sinks, and Sewers: A History of the Bathroom, explains the history of personal cleanliness and hygiene to children in grades 5-8.
| A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used. |
How long have my Toilets of the World pages been around? I'm not exactly sure, although they started in the mid 1990s as a single page on a Purdue University server. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you see what that looked like as far back as January 17, 1999.
My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001, although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous Toilet of the World page until January 17, 2002. Some time soon after that I split it into categories, and the collection has grown ever since.
In December, 2010 I registered the toilet-guru.com domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.
If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in (or at least tolerate):
