Where is the Seat?
Sometimes you will find that a toilet is missing its seat. I don't mean a squat toilet, but a raised porcelain commode that has holes for mounting a seat and lid but has neither.
A seatless toilet at the Vatican. Seatlessness is next to cleanliness.
It's a cleanliness issue.
Toilet seats are made of relatively soft and somewhat porous plastic or painted wood. The bowl itself, however, is vitreous. That is, glass-like. It's extremely hard and non-porous.
That means that the seating surface gets less dirty, and can more easily and effectively be cleaned. Have you ever really cleaned your toilet seat and lid, getting down around the hinge and under the rear of the seat where you can't easily clean? Nasty, isn't it? Wouldn't it be much cleaner if that seat and lid weren't there at all, so you could easily wipe it clean?
Two toilets in the Ionian Domatia in Vathy town, on the island of Samos. These are intense avacado models with forcibly removed seats and lids.
Just be careful that you don't fall down into the bowl when using a seatless commode!
Public toilets throughout Europe may be seatless. This gets more common as you go further south.
By the time you get to Greece, you will find that even toilets in hotel rooms or in pensions or domatia (effectively extra rooms in private homes) lack seats. Strangely, the seatless toilets in Greece often have the removed seat and lid sitting in the corner somewhere, as if the owner recently got fed up and ripped the thing loose.
Public toilet, Moscow, Russia. Note the standard Russian lack of seat, just a refreshingly cool porcelain bowl. These are especially bracing during those chilly Russian winters.
Some people in the U.S. purchase a small stool to elevate their feet while seated on a raised commode, to somewhat mimic the anatomical pose of squatting.
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):
