Greek Toilets — Toilets of the Mainland

This page has modern Greek toilets on the mainland. See the Historical Toilets section of the menu at left for several categories of Ancient Greek toilets, and see the Greek Islands page for toilets of the Aegean Sea.

I've been to Greece a number of times. They may have invented western civilization a couple of millennia back, but a number of things, including their plumbing, suggests that they've slipped downhill since. Greece seems to me to have the worst public toilets in Europe, and is the home of my current Worst Toilet of the World award.

Greek Toilet Logistics:

ΑΝΔΡΩΝ = MEN
ΓΥΝΑΙΚΩΝ = WOMEN

Greece is well to the east of the Paper Curtain, the Bowl-Bin Dividing Line. All toilet paper should be placed in the waste bin and not put into the toilet. Click here for further details on this important tissue issue.

The Προαστιακος or Proastiakos is the regional train, connecting Athens to its airport and running as far as the nearby city of Korinthos.

The Proastiakos runs about every 60 minutes in the middle of the day, so you will probably have to wait some time for a train. At left is the toilet on the platform. At right is the graffiti-plagued train on the platform, and a εισιτηριο προαστιακος.

                    
This is one of the toilets in the Travelers' and Students' Inn, a hostel in Athens.

Since most of the people staying there are unfamiliar with some of the peculiarities of Greek toilets, they have a helpful sign.

You push a button on the wall to unleash a flush from the tank mounted up near the ceiling.

However, the way it works is that the button is a plunger connected to the valve by a length of plastic tubing. You have to do more than simply press it — you have to push it in quickly to provide enough of an impulse to operate the valve.

Don't just press it gently — give it a sharp push!

And for those people who just can't get enough plumbing, or who otherwise want pictures of sinks and vanities (or the lack thereof), here is more from the Students' and Travelers' Inn!

Here is the shared bathroom at the Marble House hotel in Athens.

Below you can see the flush tank, mounted near the ceiling. You flush the toilet by pressing in the plunger extending from the bottom of the tank.

This is a handicap accessible toilet on board a relatively new train running from Athens to the Kalambaka station at Meteora.

As the sign says:

ΜΗ ΡΙΧΝΕΤΕ ΧΑΡΤΙΑ ΣΤΗ ΛΕΚΑΝΗ

MI RIKHNETE KHARTIA STI LEKANI

DON'T THROW PAPERS IN THE TOILET

This is the public toilet at the train station in Kalambaka, at Meteora, in northwestern Greece. Interior views at right, exterior below.

The Sydney Inn in Kastraki, under the rock pillars of Meteora, has nice bathrooms like these. They include a version of the standard sign:
Μη ρίχνετε χαρτιά στη λεκάνη

A number of people have been after me to include other bathroom fixtures, like sinks and vanities. Well, you'll have a sink, but you won't always have a fancy vanity (nor do you need it). Sometimes you don't even have tops on the light fixtures. That's another thing you don't really need.

Meteora is a fantastic looking area in northwestern Greece. It has been a monastic center since the 11th century. Byzantine monks built monasteries on eroded rock pinnacles.

At left you can see the monastery of Moni Varlaam. It was built in 1541. It was reputed to house the finger of Saint John and the shoulder blade of Saint Andrew.

The cliff faces here are up to 373 meters tall. Access was intentionally difficult. The traditional method of access was to be lifted in a basket suspended by a rope. When asked when the ropes were replaced, the monks famously answered "When the Lord lets them break".

The toilets, however, are very modern. At right is one of the toilets for visitors.

Access to the monasteries today is via steep staircases, and in some cases, narrow footbridges. Visiting Orthodox priests have the option of riding a small metal cage carried by a set of steel cables.

An unusually bright orange bathroom housing a squat toilet awaits you at this taverna in Kastraki.

So much of Greece is covered in graffiti, like the public toilet in the central park in Nafplio, south of Korinthos in the Peloponnese.

Nafplio, or Ναύπλιον, was captured at the end of November, 1821 during the Greek War of Independence. At least it was spared the fate of Tripolitsa, which had surrendered to the Greek forces on 5 October, 1821. 12,000 inhabitants were massacred by hanging, burning, and impaling. Over 200 Jews were killed for good measure, some of them by crucifixion.

There were awful massacres on both sides. The Ottoman Sultan did not see the Greek revolt as an expression of national self-determination, for two reasons. First, to a large extent it was not any such expression, it was brutal fighting between lawless factions who happened to be based in Greece. Second, the concept of national self-determination was meaningless to the Sultan, who saw the unrest as attempts by greedy individuals to grab power.

Eventually, by 1822, a "Free Greek State" was established in the Peloponnese. Really it was just an anarchy of klepht banditry in a region no longer under Ottoman control. The intellectuals of Greek descent living in European capitals and their Philhellene supporters were appalled. European governments announced that, as far as they could see, there was no Greek government with which to interact.

Some of those European (and even a few American) Philhellene idealists showed up, for a variety of adventures and misadventures. One was Thomas Cochrane, the Earl of Dundonald, who had lived a life of adventure. He had been court-martialed, convicted of fraud and elopement, expelled from the House of Commons, and stripped of the K.C.B. He became a mercenary, fighting in several Latin American independence movements, hijacking half the Brazilian navy at one point, and eventually making it to the Greek debacle.

Lord Byron arrived in 1824 with nine servants, a personal physician, and a collection of several handsome uniforms. Despite having his own physician on hand, in April he died of fever in Missolonghi.

The Battle of Navarino, on 20 October 1827, was the last battle between wooden sailing ships. This was a joint British-French-Russian operation against Turkish and Egyptian (Ibrahim Pasha's fleet) ships. Greece was also the site of the last battle between rowed galleys, the Battle of Lepanto on 7 October 1571. That one was a Papal-decreed Venetian-Spanish move against the Ottoman navy.

Nafplio became the seat of the series of provisional governments of Greece, and was made the official national capital in 1829. Count Ioannis Kapodistrias was named the head of state of Greece, and set foot on the Greek mainland for the first time in Nafplio in January, 1828. He had been born on the island of Corfu, a Venetian possession at the time, and then had served as a diplomat for the Russian Empire. He was living in Switzerland when he was surprised to learn that the newly formed Greek National Assembly had elected him as their first head of state. He was assassinated by local warlords on the steps of the Church of Saint Spyridon on 9 October 1831. This ushered in a period of greater than usual anarchy.

Then the Greek government decided that what they really needed was a king. The Great Powers (the United Kingdom, France, and the Russian Empire) looked around and picked Otto, the Prince of Bavaria, who conveniently was of royal blood and a minority of age, the latter helpful for keeping control in outside hands. Otto and a three-man Bavarian council came to Nafplio, leading to criticism that Greece was controlled by a Bavaritocracy. Nafplio remained the national capital until King Otto decided in 1834 to move the capital to Athens.

Otto was described by Thomas Gallant in "Modern Greece" (Oxford Univ. Press, 2003) as "neither ruthless enough to be feared, nor compassionate enough to be loved, nor competent enough to be respected." He continued running a largely Bavarian government until, with the German troops withdran in 1843, a popular revolt successfully demanded that a constitution finally be written and that it require the Greek government to include some actual Greeks.

In 1853 Otto was considering entering the Crimean War, to fight with Russia against Turkey. This was part of the Great Idea or Μεγάλη Ιδέα, a scheme to more or less re-establish the vast empire of Alexander the Great just as a starting point, and then expand from there. Britain was fighting Russia and didn't want Greece providing any help to the Russians, however limited, and blockaded the Greek ports.

That led to further unrest. A student tried to assassinate Queen Amalia in 1861, and was openly hailed as a hero. Otto went on to be deposed in 1862, and left Greece as he had arrived, on a British warship, on his way home to Bavaria.

The Greek National Assembly now knew that underage Bavarian kings were a bad idea. So, they elected a 17 year old Danish prince, Prince Vilhelm of Denmark. Really. At least he learned Greek fairly quickly, and managed to rule for 50 years before being assassinated in Thessaloniki.

King Alexander I of Greece was walking in the grounds of his summer palace at Tatoi on 30 September 1920. His pet monkey was attacked by his dog Fritz. The king was breaking up the fight when he was bit by the monkey's mate. The King died of blood poisoning from that bite, lingering until 25 October.

Authors Boatswain and Nicholson described attempts to rally the Greek people behind a specific and narrow view of Greek history and destiny in "A Traveler's History of Greece": "These efforts to make the Greeks of Asia Minor aware of their heritage were not helped by the imposition of a pseudo-cassical language known as katharevousa, an artificial tongue that had never been spoken by anyone. The attempt to impose it as an "official" language cut ordinary people off from government, public life, and even from literature, and its alienating effects were felt until recent times."

This is the toilet at Dimitri Bekas' Rooms in Nafplio.

And also the shower and a close view of the graphical admonition to put all paper into the waste bin.

This toilet in a restaurant in Nafplio is not just clean, it is sanitized!

This is a toilet on board Inter-City train number 54, the Αριστοτελης, the Aristotelis (or Aristotle), running from Athens to Thessaloniki. Greek passenger trains aren't painted in a camouflage or Pop Art scheme, but many are almost completely covered with graffiti.

This toilet is in the Thessaloniki train station. It's basic — just a seatless bowl and stainless steel waste bin and brush. But as train station toilets go, it's pretty nice.

KTEL, the national bus company in Greece, has some buses with on-board toilets.

Most of the on-board bus toilets I have seen are at the right rear, replacing maybe two rows of seats. The Greek ones, however, are down in the center stairwell. They look like they would be awfully small.

I don't know, and I can't put the blue Sani-Flush border around this picture, because they seem to routinely be locked shut.

Yes, they have toilets. But you can't use them.

This toilet in the Korinthos train station, Peloponnese, Greece. is an example of the relatively rare mainland European squatter. Well, relatively rare in western Europe anyway, outside French bars.

This austere seatless example is in the Akti Hotel, in Korinthos, Greece.

At Olympia, Peloponnese, Greece, was the site of the original Olympic Games and the Temple of Olympian Zeus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

This seatless toilet is no wonder, however.

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. [....] Poor sanitation, bad hygiene, and unsafe water — usually unsafe because it has fecal particles in it — cause one in ten of the world's illnesses. [....] Diarrhea — nearly 90 percent of which is caused by fecally contaminated food or water — kills a child every fifteen seconds. The number of children who have died from diarrhea in the last decade [1998-2008] exceeds the total number of people killed by armed conflict since the Second World War.

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.

If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in (or at least tolerate):

• Travel suggestions
• To Bob's main site