Squatties

We visited several monasteries this weekend.  We went to one of our favorites, Osios Loukas (St. Luke) which is near Delphi, and to two monasteries of Meteora, up on the rocky buttes near Kalambaka.

Meteora: the monasteries are perched on the tops of these peculiar buttes risking  up out of the plain.

The point of monastic life is to withdraw from the world and focus on prayer and closeness to god. They live either alone, or in a monastic community, where they "fight for the absolution and salvation of his soul and his union with God" according to information at one of the monasteries in Meteora.  The one at Osios Loukas does not demonstrate this withdrawal as clearly as the ones at Meteora do. They are still very difficult to reach, involving many flights of steep stone stairs.  One of my students noted that there was no possibility that someone who could not walk could ever visit any of these monasteries.  Absolutely true. They are built for inaccessibility, not for universal accessibility.  The stairs are a very late addition, added in the 1920s.  Before then,  you reached the Meteora monasteries by long ladders or rope ladders, or a net on a hook brought up using a human-powered winch.

So it is interesting to me that at both monasteries, the women's toilets were squatty potties.  Although the monasteries are now accessible, they are still not meant for comfort.  I don't know if that is why they are this type of toilet.  The ones at Hosios Loukas may just have been added long enough ago, that they just have not updated them.  They did build a second set with regular toilets, so you have your choice.  But at Meteora, they were all squatties.  And interestingly enough, the rest of the rest rooms were recently updated.  At Great Meteoron, I took these photos to show the contrast.  The sinks are the very modern hands-free type that I hate which turn on (or not) when you wave your hands in front of a sensor.  But the toilets are the squatty type. 

automatic sensor sinks

ceramic squatty potty

At Barlaam, they installed sleek new automatic doors that open via a sensor, but behind  the doors are the old squatty potties.  I can imagine several reasons for this.   One possibility is weight.  Everything still has to be brought up by a winch and basket system, though there is now an electric winch, a metal wire, and a metal basket.  So perhaps it makes more sense to bring up the smallest version of a toilet possible.  Perhaps it is simply timing -- they are in the middle of their renovation of the bathrooms and next time we come they will have sitting potties.  Or perhaps this is what people expect at a monastery, the traditional type of toilet.  Or perhaps this is part of the asceticism of the monastic life, and even we visitors get to experience a small sliver.

I find these fascinating and have written before about the experience because it really gets to Americans.  My students often find the differences in bathroom habits to be the hardest to get used to.  This hits home for many because it touches on deep early cultural expectations of hygiene, of taboo, and of what it really means to inhabit someone else's world.  We use the toilet several times daily, and it is where we learned some of the first rules of our lives.  If you can think  your way around this, become relativistic about bathroom habits, you can probably think your way around any cultural collision.  And the toilet differences are culturally interesting because they also demonstrate how cultural these deep-seated beliefs are.  There is some question in the US about whether our sit-down toilets are causing health problems for Americans. There was a small study (which was inconclusive) looking at whether sitting on a toilet might be a risk factor for colo-rectal cancer.  There have been a few other small studies looking at whether sitting or squatting is better for avoiding hemorrhoids.  None of the research has been conclusive, but the point the point is that sitting on a toilet may not actually be the best way to do it.  So our disdain of cultures that squat may be a expression of cultural bias rather than  progress.