by Katerina Nikolas

Created on: March 08, 2010   Last Updated: November 20, 2010

One of the great ironies of Modern Greek history is that the military junta, which came to power in 1967, and were generally despised as a cruel dictatorship, did introduce one thing to rural Greece which was a welcome change. The junta decreed that every home had the right to have a bathroom. This may strike some as a contradictory communist notion for a military power to come up with. The truth is quite a few people were suspect of this generous offer, because not only were the junta decreeing bathroom rights to all, they were paying for them too.

Now when a house has never had a bathroom the natural thing for the rural peasant of that time was to build an outdoor bathroom. Some built them onto the house with out side access and many old village houses still feature this style. Others didn’t quite understand the concept so well and simply installed a modern toilet in the garden with a wooden surround.

There is a local Greek man who has never updated from the basic toilet with shed around it. No giving in to pressure to install a modern inside bathroom which could easily be afforded, the outside one still rules the day. The original intent was to build the said outside toilet just a step or two from the house, but the neighbor complained it would be visible from her kitchen window.

Not wanting to become embroiled in a lifelong feud with the neighbor, a common Greek occurrence which generally leads whole generations into making trouble for said neighbors, the house owner of the time complied and moved the position of the toilet a good few hundred yards away, ensuring a muddy tramp across water logged ground in winter, to reach the facilities.

Most excellent work was done within the small confines of the four walls. An uneven concrete floor was laid but never tiled, nails were inserted into the walls for handily placing clothes on whilst showering, and a hosepipe was connected to a water barrel on the roof, allowing showers. No light was installed as electricity hadn’t reached the rural outreaches then.

Forty years later the local Greek lives in the house his grandfather once owned, and the bathroom situation remains as it always has. The man happened to meet a woman and fall in love, but was faced with a dilemma. What modern woman in her right mind is going to be satisfied with an outside toilet with a hose pipe as a place to do her ablutions, the very notion is absurd?

In swift anticipation of this the man rushed out in the first flush of love

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