‘Environment Agency figures earlier this year showed there were a total of 301,091 sewage spills [in England] in 2022, an average of 824 a day.’ THE GUARDIAN, May 2023

 

‘VERY IMPORTANT PROBLEM! is written in large,

black capital letters, at a slight angle,

with a marker pen, in the toilette

of an otherwise sophisticated

café – with organic credentials –

on the busy road from Iraklion

to Archanes, opposite the entrance

to Arthur Evans’ Villa Ariadne,

a short walk from the Knossos heritage site.

The ‘problem’ is toilet paper in the

toilet bowl, a generally

unbruited facet of modern Attic life.

 

Not much further on from Knossos the road

crosses the Archanes Gorge, which is spanned

by a now defunct aqueduct, built

by one group of imperialist invaders,

and later its flow enhanced by another.

It brought enough water from Mount Juktas

to the centre of Candia – now

Iraklion – for the daily needs,

including fountains, of a burgeoning

population of colonisers, first

the Venetians then the Ottomans.

Until recently, the site was visited

only by historians of hydraulic engineering,

and an old poet and his family.

 

Though there are myths and hypotheses,

we know factually very little about

the civilisation that built Knossos –

whose environs, at its zenith, housed

eighteen thousand people – including,

of course, what they wiped their bottoms with.

But we do know they had flush toilets,

clean water supply lines, and a system

of drainage that properly separated

rain water from sewage.