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Histories, Spaces and Heritages at the Transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek State

Talking Filth: Abjection and Modernity in Post-Ottoman Crete

Un sujet de dégoût : abjection et modernité dans la Crète post-ottomane
Aris Anagnostopoulos

Résumés

Les théories de l’abjection envisagent généralement le sujet comme une caractéristique constante et transhistorique des organisations humaines, comme un corollaire naturel des fonctions corporelles et psychologiques. Toutefois, les approches historiques, et post-coloniales en particulier, considèrent l’abjection comme directement liée au déploiement des techniques disciplinaires d’un État occidental vis-à-vis des populations colonisées. Les techniques de contrôle et d’assainissement sont ainsi devenues l’expression des impératifs civilisateurs de l’expansion impérialiste. Nous examinons ici les ambivalences de l’abjection dans la ville crétoise d’Héraklion pendant la période post-ottomane, pour montrer que ces ambivalences sont directement liées à la mémoire de telles missions civilisatrices. Au début du xxe siècle, la mise en œuvre des techniques coloniales de domination par les forces d’occupation britanniques s’effectue en même temps que les réformes urbaines approuvées par l’État. La combinaison de ces deux processus a engendré un régime d’historicité, qui apparaît dans des récits facétieux questionnant son achèvement, ses buts politiques et les fondements mêmes de la civilisation occidentale. Dans les discours publics, les fonctions corporelles deviennent un terrain disputé pour une mémoire critique de la modernisation entérinée par l’État. Le prétendu passage de la barbarie à la civilisation, avec la fin de la suzeraineté ottomane, est interrogé dans un sens tendant à montrer que la distinction qu’il a créée entre le propre et le sale, le Grec et le Turc, le nouveau et l’ancien, la ville et la campagne n’est qu’une façade masquant la collusion entre l’État et les classes privilégiées dans leurs efforts de modernisation de la ville.

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  • 1 Lacan 2001, p. 11.

“La civilisation, y rappelai‑je en prémisse, c’est l’égout”
[Civilization, I reminded them as my premise, is the sewer.]1

Encountering memories of abjection

1Sitting with a group of anthropology students for an interview in the kitchen-living room of an elderly woman at a village in the mountainous province of Malevizi, some forty kilometres to the southwest of the capital city of Crete, Iraklion, we were soon engaged in a performance that is not uncommon in such offhand conversations. Τhe elderly woman, after drawing some expected comparisons of the direness of life in the past with the comfort of life in the present, embarked on a graphic description of the defecating habits of villagers before toilets were installed. People, she informed us with a testing smile, only had one option to relieve themselves, and this was out in the open, leading to unexpected encounters that are nowadays remembered as poignant anecdotes about rural life in the past.

2The discussion on the defecatory habits of this woman’s co‑villagers in the recent past followed naturally from a soliloquy on her relationship with the modern conveniences surrounding her, and her refusal to move to the newly built urban apartment of her children, in Iraklion. To prove her point that she had no need for these conveniences because she was accustomed to a different mode of life, she went on to describe the ways in which this everyday need would be satisfied out in public, in family shit‑pits (koprolakoi), or in nearby fields. Her pleasure rose as she observed the awkwardness of our group, expressed in giggles, red faces, darting glances, or uncomfortable silence. After explaining in detail how one would choose the appropriate spot and the appropriate time for not being seen, she delivered her parting blow by asking us how we think they got out of unavoidable encounters with passers‑by while defecating out in public; “it was simple” she answered her question with visible pleasure, “if someone approached, we just shut our eyes to avoid being seen!”

3Our woman interlocutor is the widow of a well-respected owner of a grocery store and cafe at the centre of this mainly pastoralist village. She is one of the nearly a hundred―mostly elderly―inhabitants of this village who look back to much better days, to a village of well over a thousand people who swarmed its shops, its many cafes, and the municipal school. The modern kitchen we were sitting in was once the cafe where the first public phone of the village had been installed in the 1940s. Cafes have been male-dominated places and points of communication with the city and the central state. All newspapers in the village arrived and were read at the cafes, the postman left all correspondence there, including old people’s pensions and utility bills, the first phones were installed there and served many homes around them. They were, and still are, public spaces where very private conversations would sometimes take place, and a telling context for our discussion that transgresses these boundaries of public and private.

4Privies were a late occurrence in the village, imposed by decree during the Greek military junta of 1967–1974. A coffee-shop owner in the same village told an elaborate story of how the locals reacted to this invasion of their living space by what amounted to a state-sanctioned civilizing mission for rural areas, causing peals of laughter in his all‑male audience. He described the efforts they made to build latrines as far as possible from their bedrooms, where their spouses and children slept, avoiding proximity as much as possible. He marvelled at the inventiveness of some individuals, who managed to produce latrines that were veritable technical feats. And, as a conclusion, he poked fun at those who seek to whitewash the dictatorship by claiming that it made a lot of asphalt roads and public works: “the junta did something after all!” he said, with a wink and a sly smile. For all the civilizing claims of the junta and their claim to have modernized the country, all they did, he hinted, is equal to what one does in a toilet.

  • 2 Herzfeld 1991, pp. 24–25.

5These narratives, the space in which they were offered, between public and private, as well as the discourses on modernity they debated, introduce the complex references involved in the invocation of scatological tropes in public. The opposition between city and country as synecdoche for civilization and backwardness tie the perception of linear temporal progress into a spatial configuration that is not specific, but is still pervasive in the discussion of Cretan identity.2 The body here acts as the centre of this narrative, embodying these spatio-temporal discourses in enacted memories that probe the liminal position of their subjects between rural and urban, new and old, luxurious and authentic, progressive and backward. I have been offered similar recollections in many other discussions with elderly people, and especially women, in Iraklion, the capital city of the island. An eighty-year-old woman in particular―who was born in a village of the Pediada province and had moved to the city in her twenties during the Second World War―was even more descriptive: “We would do it out in the open, in the company of animals, and then wipe ourselves with a leaf” and added, after a pause to estimate the impact of her words and a conspiratorial glance to her second cousin, also a woman in her eighties, “God, I wonder how we did not catch anything.” At another instance, a sixty-year-old housewife from a different village of Pediada, also a city-dweller for at least forty years, told me, “don’t imagine that we had toilets back then, you had to go to the shit‑pit,” placing special emphasis on the word describing the communal toilet of the village, as if that alone was sufficient to elicit the reaction of the urbane, educated audience, to which I perceivably belonged. My interlocutors persistently referred to themselves as living testaments of a transition from what they saw as feral naturalness to civilized urbanity.

  • 3 The prefix is not without further connotations and associations of the low hygiene standards in vi (...)

6The spectrum of reactions to such discussions, from self-righteous protest to an attempt to up the ante in an antagonistic exchange of embarrassing anecdote, is evidently not fuelled by the intention to demonstrate the self-deprecating character of the narrator. It is a performative speech aimed to socialize these bodily memories by probing the limits of “proper” social interaction. A ninety-year-old woman, originally from the Lasithi province, but many years since an inhabitant of Iraklion, referred to the nicknames of a neighbouring family of old: “Kasorini, Kasonikolaki’s sister, you understand what Kasorini means, don’t you?”, in her attempt to explain to me the prefix kaso-, which signifies the dirt (kasa) accumulated from prolonged neglect of personal hygiene, and which, combined with the female name Irini produces the nickname.3 After I assured her that I fully understand the term, she let out a conspiratorial laughter and added: “how miserable!” (tous kakomitsides). While the elderly woman knew very well that I was an urbane, middle class, educated male, she nevertheless placed this question in a strategic point of her story to question whether I shared the distinction between city and country that run through her embodied discourses of cleanliness and propriety. Her question was aimed to place me, but also to make sure she herself was positioned correctly in respect to this spectrum of embarrassment: although she came from a village in the countryside, she was to be considered an urbanite, especially when compared with the sanitary state of those villagers she referred to. However, in this, as in other occasions where fieldwork led to discussions about the sanitary habits of the past, our interlocutor was very much aware that what he or she was saying was not half as shocking as the fact that it was her who said it. Her speech may have been considered shocking in itself, but what produced the shock depended more on the dialectics between narrator and listener―who in this case were “educated” and urbane men and women―, rather than any affective content inherent in her words. This performative teasing provides us with the second characteristic of such talk: that it is intended to question the success and completeness of civilizing projects of modernity by pointing to the gap between the authenticity of the past and the alienation from “natural” functions effected on urbane individuals by this very project.

  • 4 See Anagnostopoulos 2019; Argenti 2017; Bryant 2016; for a comparative case in Cyprus, see Argyrou(...)

7These instances highlight an aspect of modernity that is underplayed in most sociological or political formulations of the term, either as historical epoch or as aesthetic phenomenon; they bring to the fore the creation of an abject past that is essential to any understanding of the march to civilization and human progress. The past, they claim, is not only delegated a pastness, but also a foulness and an impropriety that summarizes an incredibly condensed array of oppositions and analogies: dirty and clean, rural and urban, illiterate and educated, boorish and civilized, and so on and so forth. Frictions between different regimes of temporality are therefore given additional “cultural” layers in performances that are evoked or facilitated by ethnographic encounters in the field. As I contend in what follows, in this particular case, these discourses also extrapolate on the historical transformations associated with the transition from Ottoman Empire to what is nowadays theorized as the post-Ottoman space, further complicated by the active involvement of colonial powers in administration and social life.4

From dirt as “culture” to abjection as historical effect

  • 5 Hartog 2015.
  • 6 Hartog 2015, p. 16.
  • 7 Certeau 1986, p. 4.

8While abjection is usually approached in theory as an area that may be characteristic of all humans, it constitutes here a terrain in which the historical meets the bodily, and a critical space for the interweaving of bodily memory with more encompassing social and cultural processes. The temporal lag in the implementation of sanitary techniques between city and country in Greece may have created a differential geography of civilized values; I suggest furthermore that the sensuous manifestation of such differentials may also be related to a specific “regime of historicity”5 evident at particular conjunctions of colonial techniques of rule and national(ist) processes and subjects in history. Extending Hartog’s usage, we could use these conjunctions heuristically as vantage points from which to investigate a society’s relations to time as they develop “historically,” and more specifically as “moments of crisis of time, as they have arisen whenever the way in which past, present, and future are articulated no longer seems self-evident.”6 Scatological jokes may very well be an example of the “return” of an excluded body into the “clean” place of the present,7 however this cleansing is not merely a psychical structure, but can be traced to specific historical instances. In what follows, I suggest that the temporality of the repetition that psychoanalytic approaches to abjection assume, and the temporality of succession in the historical critique of civilizing discourses may share more common ground than what is evident at first.

  • 8 Lincoln 1989, p. 165; Douglas 1966, pp. 39–40.
  • 9 Cohen 2005.
  • 10 But see Freud 1961, p. 52.
  • 11 Van Der Geest 1998, p. 9.
  • 12 E.g. Douglas 1966.
  • 13 Douglas 1966, p. 35.

9Key to the entry into this terrain is the employment of humour and ridicule, which indicates a strategic way of dealing with a social “anomaly.”8 But where precisely is the anomaly, and what is its social nature? Sociological approaches agree generally that despite the humble nature of polluting stuff, its management in linguistic, psychological and material terms becomes important because of its proximity to the human body and its fundamental significance for the preservation of life.9 Excrement, dirt, misplaced matter may be a universal source of consternation and aversion.10 It is common in anthropological writing to assume that there is a sort of metaphorical mechanism that always and everywhere connects these “abominations” with social phenomena: “Dirty = ugly = unattractive = nasty = bad = uncivilized = shameful = not respected.”11 Approaches in symbolic anthropology12 postulating the universality of the human body as symbol, point at excrement and dirt as fundamental to the symbolic construction of the cosmos. Simultaneously, though, they introduce a cultural relativist approach, where dirt is matter out of its socially appointed place.13

  • 14 Miller 1997.
  • 15 Kristeva 1982.
  • 16 Miller 1997; Kristeva 1982; Freud 1961.

10On the contrary, psychoanalytic and hygienic approaches stipulate that some matter may be trans-culturally and trans-historically considered dirt. William Miller, for example, sees the “disgustingness” of objects as relevant to the centrality of the body not only as symbol but also as biological entity.14 Therefore, things moving in and out of the body are more often deemed polluting than other objects; this intimacy may account for the symbolic power of filth, by connecting the repudiated maternal figure to the abject related to bodily fluids and orifices.15 Furthermore, Miller claims, truly filthy objects are non-reusable. The abject is thus a problematic thing, neither subject nor object, simultaneously disavowed and central to ontogenesis and phylogenesis.16

  • 17 Bakhtin 1984.
  • 18 See for example Anderson 1995 for a discussion of how American colonial medicine produced grotesqu (...)
  • 19 Esty 1999, pp. 25–26.

11Both approaches allow some space for cultural difference in considerations of abjection but do not commonly emphasize its historical transformation. This is somewhat remedied in post-colonial critiques that have examined scatology as a subversive trope at work against Western manners and polite habits, or the “West” in general. There is a rich tradition from which to draw in Western literary tradition and criticism, in the vein of Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World,17 which seeks to identify a counter-movement against the prescriptive, normative power of the “civilizing process.”18 Joshua Esty summarizes the political import of such an exercise as follows: “In post-colonial writing, shit can redress a history of debasement by displaying the failures of development and the contradictions of colonial discourse and, moreover, by disrupting inherited associations of excrement with colonized or non-Western populations.”19

  • 20 Dreyfus, Rabinow 1983, p. 128.
  • 21 Elias 1982.
  • 22 Turner 2008, p. 78.
  • 23 Jervis 1999, p. 37.
  • 24 Greenblatt 1990, p. 60.
  • 25 Anderson 1991.
  • 26 Greenblatt 1990, p. 61.
  • 27 Prakash 1994.
  • 28 Corbin 1996, p. 90.

12Such a reading shares much with what Michel Foucault termed the “repressive hypothesis,” which assumes that throughout the history of the European continent, populations have moved from “a period of relative openness” about bodily functions in speech “to an ever increasing repression and hypocrisy.”20 Self-control was central to social developments that brought about modern society;21 an introspective examination of one’s own health developed simultaneously with scientific and colonial projects concerned with the mastery of the world.22 Health became equivalent to “secular salvation, to be attained through purity and cleanliness,”23 and particularly through the “definition and control of wastes.”24 Patricia Anderson notes how these personal perceptions of sanitation and individual health were bound up with a notion of a civilized, responsible, and therefore clean, public, mostly through the development of the periodical press. Exhortations to become civilized were thus instrumental in forging new class relationships more appropriate to the national state, ones that were based on refinement and distinction.25 In turn, these novel distinctions created a variety of new subjects which were compared and contrasted according to the value scale of “civility”: well-bred and vulgar, child and adult, urbane and rustic, civilized and barbaric.26 Most importantly, however, they placed the source of filth and disease outside the social formations of the West, identifying whole areas with the culturally dirty “other” of this civilizing process.27 Finally, this project of “disinfection” and purification of public space in Western metropoles was rendered natural, and the process by which it came by was occluded. As Alain Corbin noted, it constituted a “utopian plan to conceal the evidence of organic time.”28 The utopian in this case, as I read it, refers to both the scope and scale of the undertaking and to the impossibility to completely excise the lived reality of the individual body and the communal habit from the life of the cities.

13Looking ethnographically at the ways that populations perform bodily memories of abjection may thus offer a more nuanced view to the historical processes that constitute binaries of cleanliness and dirt as “natural” and coterminous to self and other. They also reveal how these bipoles are never as clear‑cut as they seem at first, but constitute an ongoing process of domination that is remembered in a different time‑scale than other historical events. In this particular case, the urban reforms promoted by Western powers in concert with local notables did not manage to eliminate what was seen as the sanitary shortcomings of the city and part of its population, albeit they succeeded in ousting them to a purportedly concluded barbaric past. These mores, dictated by necessity, kept existing side-by-side with such modernizing efforts, which were in turn seen as inauthentic emulations of Western ways.

Abject tropes as resistance to modernity?

14As personal discursive strategy, toilet talk marks a declension from the norm, in this instance a civilized European identity. As a trope, it shares the ambivalences of local and national narratives of modernity. The tacit script in such pronouncements is that there is indeed a residue of “backwardness” and “barbarism” that has resisted the efforts to civilize Cretans, and Irakliots in particular; and that can be reverted to at any instant, should the subject so wish. This script is commonly rehearsed in everyday situations. For example, it is often the case that in the course of conversation or argument, younger generations will briefly revert to speaking the local dialect, not to be better understood, but to add a humorous tone to their discussions. The conscious use of Cretan dialect in a humorous context, when mastery of official Greek is a given, does not constitute, as it might seem on the surface, a show of the speaker’s ability to use local dialect, his or her control of the repositories of tradition. Rather, it demonstrates to fellow speakers the poetic-performative ability of the speaker to emulate the mores of Western civilized comportment at will: an ability that speaks to the artificiality of these conventions in comparison to a perceived authentic, but historically distant, nature of the indigenous population. Similarly, part of the enjoyment of scatological talk is the performative ability of the speaker to revert at will to an assumed original condition of unadulterated wildness and innocence.

  • 29 Prashad 2001, p. 155.

15But should we consider scatological jokes as simply a version of the Hegelian “discourse of the slave” that never escapes the power relations it enters into, simply because their frame of reference is a more encompassing structure of power, or are they something different? Do they instead assume this residue of barbarism as resistance to the process that squarely put the blame for this failed modernity into the cultural traits of the Cretan people? By picking up the paradoxes and vicissitudes of these discourses, they point at the limit of capitalist modernity as an inherent trait of the nexus of capital and technologies of population management and urban reform.29 They speak as subjects that were placed at the place of this very limit, in order to disguise the shortcomings of these two processes of modernization.

  • 30 Friedl 1962, p. 42.
  • 31 Just 1995, p. 296, italics in text.
  • 32 Sutton 1998, p. 37.

16Indeed, ethnographic evidence from elsewhere in Greece seems to point in this direction. Ernestine Friedl noticed, in late-1950s Vassilika, the insistence of villagers on erecting outhouses and replacing existing latrines of the type that is widely known in Greece as “Turkish”―where one squats rather than sits―with “modern” toilet bowls, to avoid ridicule by their urban relatives.30 Roger Just notes that locals in Meganisi of the early 1980s equated urbanization and civilization with advances in sanitary provision: “this is a village, isn’t it? We don’t have politismos [civilization]; we don’t even have toilets.”31 As David Sutton observes, such conceptualizations refer and comment upon overarching schemes of valuation. To the eyes of the inhabitants of the island of Kalymnos, Europeans were cleaner than they were, and Kalymnos’s inadequacies in sanitary provision would reveal its “lack of civilization.” At the same time, all locals saw themselves as cleaner than the Turks, therefore reproducing an imaginary hierarchy of civilized values that ranges from the dirty and insalubrious “East” to the advanced and clean “West.” An historical explanation is offered locally, in order to account for Kalymnos’s lack in this respect. The islanders’ resistance to the Italian occupying forces, who are remembered as having built “beautiful toilets” in Kos and Rhodes, in their eyes, signifies a generalized resistance against progress, which is now paid for.32

  • 33 One may perhaps argue that such criticisms of modernity may have their roots on widespread ideas o (...)
  • 34 Du Boulay 1976, p. 396.
  • 35 E.g. Scott 1990.

17Irakliots themselves, although inhabiting the capital city of the island, seem very sensitive to the ambivalence of their own particular modernity, and they miss no opportunity to mock and ridicule the ideal scheme of the pursuit of alignment with Western civility.33 But all expressions of such ambivalence, while polemic in tone, are never dismissive of modernity tout court. The concern is always to maintain a critical distance from the West, all the while regarding oneself as a civilized Westerner. Mockery, in its part, has been described by anthropologists of Greece as an “escape mechanism” from the prevailing value system, which does not challenge the supremacy of the system itself however.34 Therefore, while there is a lot to say about the validity and poignancy of such critical approaches to modernity, to read such proclamations as a script for indigenous resistance35 against the encroachment of the “civilizing mission” of the West is to see only half the picture.

  • 36 Prashad 2001, p. 155.

18We should also point out the ways in which these discourses carry the load of a memory of the failure of colonial administration and national state to produce “the enchanted state dreamed of by the visionaries of the capitalist modern.”36 As such, they are not condemned into the synchronicity of “resistance” against the primacy of capitalist and colonialist development. But they persistently historicize the very foundation of assumptions about high and low, dirty and clean, civilized and backward. The question is, again, a question of power. What exactly do these people remember and how is it part of more encompassing power relations?

Colonial modernity remembered

  • 37 Hartog 2015.
  • 38 Svolopoulos 2005.

19“Civilized” bodily regimes, contrasted with backwardness, offer comments on Cretan modernity as a specific “regime of historicity.”37 Modernity is thus understood as a temporal ideology―a practical and political way of parcelling off historical time that introduces a break in a perceived linear temporality, defining a before and an after. The process of modernization is a perpetually unfinished project, ever since its first official proclamation. The historical moment when this break to modernity purportedly happened was the institution of the autonomous Cretan Polity in 1898. It saw the consummation of almost millennial Cretan hopes for enosis with the Greek kingdom. The feeling of Cretan Christians in 1898 was that by shedding the “corrupt” and “backward” Ottoman administration, Crete had entered the order of civilized nations overnight.38 But this transformation was seen in more than ethnic or religious terms, as the opportunity for an established urbane class of merchants and professionals to shape all aspects of life in a fashion resembling a civilized state.

  • 39 Svolopoulos 2005.

20It soon became apparent that the inherent shortcomings of the new Autonomous Cretan Polity made it compare unfavourably with other modern states. Low production rates, poor export, increasing foreign debt, but also the mounting distrust between the two opposing religious groups, made it impossible for the Cretan economy to recover from the destructive effects of the last Christian insurrection of 1895–1898.39 While political rhetoric sustained a discourse on modernization and progress, everyday life gradually disintegrated for the many. Better-off classes sought to fulfil their aspirations for modern life; the lower classes―especially uprooted Muslim peasants―had to struggle for survival. Both led their everyday lives in an urban environment that had few resemblances with any “advanced” city of the West. Soon, voices rose that questioned the validity of the much-promised modernization. The anonymous journalist in the daily Irakliot Eleftheria, for example, voiced what was by then a common public adage:

  • 40 Newspaper Eleftheria, 12 February 1900.

Have you seen after our liberation in this wretched Iraklion, any reform, any work, any real initiative and true action for the improvement of the city, for the beautification of this medieval pen, to show that we have made a step forward, […] that the old and dirty and miserable city has changed, and freedom drags behind her, as everywhere else, progress and reforms and public works?40

21The dissenting discourses were further complicated by the fact that modernity had come to the island, and the city of Iraklion in particular, through the presence of colonial powers. The autonomy of the island, under the suzerainty of the Sultan, was guaranteed by the military occupation by the forces of the then Great Powers: Great Britain, France, Russia and Italy. The British exerted their control over the city of Iraklion and its environs, and for a while at least, had full administrative and judicial powers over its inhabitants until their departure from the island in 1906.

  • 41 Mourellos 1931, p. 164.
  • 42 Eliadi 1933, pp. 36–37.
  • 43 Howes 2004, p. 271.
  • 44 Dermitzakis 1963, p. 85.
  • 45 Triantafyllidou-Baladié 1988.

22Contemporaries asserted that it was the presence of British officers that was instrumental in the improvement of public civility at large.41 According to some commentators, to the upper, well-educated classes that perceived the Ottoman city as a place of unruliness and disorder, British discipline became a representation of a rule of law based on these commentators’ abstract notion of common good that was guaranteed to elevate the island to the level of a Western state.42 This confluence of order and civility came together in the sensescape43 created by the British troops who impressed the city’s inhabitants with their discipline combined “with their cleanliness (pastra) and the fine aroma left behind by the aromatic cigarettes they smoked and the smell of the soap they used for their bath.”44 These sensescapes reified British cultural superiority in an ironic vicious circle of signification. The “superiority” of British blended tobacco and the exquisite aroma of British soap were in all probability partly based on Cretan produce. The hegemony of Christian Irakliot merchants was built upon profits from the export of soap and processed tobacco, either as finished product or as raw material to the ports of Western Mediterranean.45 The material superiority of the British was itself a product of their colonial rule extended in other parts of the world, which was naturalized locally as an effect of their advanced stage of “civilization.”

  • 46 Cf. Prashad 1994.
  • 47 Anagnostopoulos 2018, p. 710.
  • 48 Dermitzakis 1962, p. 58.

23Colonial techniques of rule solidified a hierarchical classification of the senses,46 with British freshness and order on its apex and Ottoman unruliness and filth on the bottom―that reflected the changing class and ethnic structure of the city in contrast to the backwardness of the countryside.47 A contemporary observer recalled, for example, “the neighbourhoods of the tobacco-industries with their unpleasant lavender smells [ironic expression for stench].”48 The western, industrial neighbourhoods of the city, almost exclusively Muslim, became sensory metaphors for the filth and deprivation that marked the abject past of the city under Ottoman rule. Thus Amabile Ittar, a renowned city doctor of Italian descent, describes to the British sanitary authorities the main culprit for Iraklion’s sorry state:

  • 49 House of Commons 1899, p. 130.

Moslem [sic] country people, being mostly affiliated to the sect of ‘Becktasheeys’ [sic], which dispenses with the precept of prayer, and consequently with ablutions, are still less apt to feel horror of filth and dirt. Therefore, very soon after the arrival in town of the country people, it was reduced to a vast cloaca and centre of infection.49

  • 50 House of Commons 1899, p. 147.
  • 51 Prashad 1994, p. 254.

24Ittar, a representative of the Western-educated bourgeois of the city, concurs with the British administration’s orientalist stereotypes, as expressed in their report: “the Turks had peculiar views on the subject [of public sanitation].”50 But he is probably up to date with contemporary manuals of sanitation, that pinpointed the causes of epidemics on the religious habits of subaltern populations.51

  • 52 Jay 1988, pp. 5–7.
  • 53 Poovey 1995, p. 79.

25The sensory metaphors employed on sanitary purposes were not solely olfactory. The presence of the British military forces also produced a complex “scopic regime,”52 in which the inhabitants and authorities of the city struggled to match European developments under the dissecting gaze of the British colonial administration. The wretched and destitute condition of the city was a constant source of embarrassment for its upper classes, who saw the chaotic, dirty and dangerous narrow streets of Iraklion as the antipode of Western urbane civilization. In a process that paralleled longer changes already in place in the West, what was in the past dealt with as a necessary shortcoming of city life―the accumulation of waste―was now put centre-stage as “evidence of a vicious, even murderous, disregard for life.”53 Colonial British opinions were usually informed by scornful amusement. Edward Lear, who had visited the city in 1864, penned the first draft of this limerick in his journal, under a comic drawing of two individuals dressed in the characteristic cape of Cretan pastoralists in the 19th century:

  • 54 Lear 1887, p. 21.

There was a young person of Crete,
Whose toilet was far from complete;
She dressed in a sack,
Spickle-speckled in black,
Which matched her complexion a treat
That ombliferous person of Crete.54

  • 55 Cf. Friedman 1992, p. 195.
  • 56 J. N. Kampanis, “Report to the Mayor of Iraklion”, manuscript, 23 March 1901, Vikelea Library Arch (...)
  • 57 ADIK 3.2/4‑261, 15 July 1899.

26Embarrassment was read locally as evidence of hegemonic perceptions of public propriety inscribed in the scopic regime of an imagined occidental public opinion.55 Thus, for example, Municipal Health Officer J. N. Kampanis noted in his report to the Mayor in 23 March 1901: “This system [of refuse collection] […] cannot but impress unfavourably the observer, and especially the foreign one, as very backward.”56 This attitude was further exacerbated when the British Authorities squarely put the blame for the condition of the city on its municipal authorities, and pressed for the implementation of a plan for refuse collection, the rebuilding of sewers and the disciplining of transgressors of sanitary bylaws.57

  • 58 Herzfeld 1995.
  • 59 Home 1997; Prashad 2001.
  • 60 Home 1997, pp. 94–95; McFarlane 2008, p. 416; see also Headrick 1988, p. 152 for a comparative cas (...)
  • 61 Clarke’s work was greeted in the most enthusiastic manner in diplomatic reports, and he was soon c (...)
  • 62 Joyce 2003, p. 68.
  • 63 E.g. Gavin 1848, p. 75.

27This embarrassment was not solely an indigenous form of “practical occidentalism,”58 but also developed in response to British sanitary discourses. The British military pushed local authorities to transform the built fabric of the city in terms of their experience of colonial urban administration, especially of port cities.59 At that particular juncture, the outbreak of plague epidemics in Indian port cities in the 1890s had hardened the line of colonial administrations responsible for sanitation. Cultural factors of colonial populations were identified as the main cause of epidemics. Population control, the demolition and restructuring of entire areas were part of the agenda, as well as increased powers to the municipal authorities.60 In Iraklion, the person responsible for the application of this colonial rationale was Captain T. H. M. Clarke, sanitation officer during the British occupation of the city at the turn of the last century.61 Clarke’s scornful account of the general population of the city displays the same mixture of scientific detachment and moral horror that characterized 19th century sanitary inspectors.62 It also shares the emphasis on technological aspects of sanitation―drainage, cesspools, sewers and latrines―with standard accounts of Victorian public medicine.63

  • 64 Dermitzakis 1963, p. 89.
  • 65 Lear 2012, p. 69.

28Clarke’s comments fuelled the complaints of the better‑off Christian inhabitants of the city and helped them offload the responsibility for the wretched appearance of the city on its past management. The image of the Ottoman city was employed to signify older orders and technologies of government and ad hoc public works. “The Old Kastro […] could neither boast for its cleanliness nor its city plan. It was a Turkish city (Tourkopolis)…”64 And yet, Christian merchants, now crusading for civilized European manners and condemning the “Turkish” wretchedness, were one or two generations before oblivious to even basic rules of personal hygiene. Edward Lear, again, noted in his 1864 journal his horror of “the mishmashious and unclean nature of things” at the house of Lysimachos Kalokerinos, the British vice-consul and soap magnate.65

A spatial and temporal discourse of abjection

  • 66 Cf. Corbin 1996, pp. 60–61 for a discussion of similar moves in early modern Europe.

29The embarrassment produced by the shortcomings in sanitary infrastructure as seen through a colonial scopic regime soon enough began finding its outlet in laughter and ridicule. An idiom of scatological jokes was thus solidified that evidences a vexed discursive domain somehow squeezed between a nascent “European” public space and the vicissitudes and realities of Irakliot life, gradually exiled to a private space that came to be seen as “excreted” in itself by such profound redrawings of the very idea of public and private.66

  • 67 Fragkaki 1978, p. 42.
  • 68 Zei 2005, p. 117.

30The sarcastic remark aimed by 19th‑century Athenian merchants at the aspiring bourgeoisie of Iraklion for their sanitary habits is indicative of this. The Irakliot’s “first piece of furniture,” according to these merchants, “was his lavatory.”67 Most of the houses in the city, as described in contracts, were one or two stories high, usually with a garden. Separate water closets were usually built as close to the street as possible, therefore very often next to the front door, for practical reasons: sewers usually consisted of a covered conduit in the middle of most main streets that would receive all sewage from private residents and carry it to the sea. For poorer populations, the public dung-heap, or a street corner was as close to privacy as they could get. New houses, and particularly the rich megara (mansions) that were built in Iraklion following late-19th century neo-classicist dictates,68 placed lavatories inside the building, as hidden as possible. Simultaneously, upper-class embarrassment over deficiencies in personal toilet habits translated into embarrassment about the public management of excrement in Iraklion.

  • 69 Remarkably, the original source of this story is an article that appeared in the British Medical J (...)

31The movement of the threshold between public and private, abject and civil was part of the civilizing colonial mission and its evolutionary undertones. Further than that, it was in this case also a historical theory of a fallen civilization: a widespread contemporary narrative tells of how the ancient Minoans―usually portrayed as a highly civilized, proto-European people―had their lavatories inside palatial complexes, in comparison to European monarchs, like Marie-Antoinette and the Sun‑King, who had to walk a distance to get to their outhouses.69

  • 70 Clarke 1903, pp. 598–599.

32Irakliots would discover, through the labours of British archaeology, their own myth of the fall, so vehemently worked into Greek nationalism, to justify their drive to purge the Turkish past of their city. In a way, the racial implications of Greek nationalism found their justification in the idiom of embarrassment. After all, Lear’s “young person of Crete” and her hygienic deficiencies were justified in racial terms as suitable to her dark complexion for everyone who wished to embark on such a reading. Clarke notes that, while he has had the opportunity to make acquaintance with modern Cretan sanitation and appreciate “how far” modern Cretans “have fallen from the standard of the Minoans,” this should not surprize anyone “considering the many vicissitudes of this unfortunate island.”70

The politics of concealment and the performance of resistance

  • 71 Anagnostopoulos 2016; Anagnostopoulos 2018; Anagnostopoulos 2019.
  • 72 Anagnostopoulos 2018.
  • 73 Anagnostopoulos 2016.

33To place the initiative for urban reform in Iraklion squarely upon British techniques of colonial rule would be to underestimate local initiative developed around public ideas of sanitation. The bourgeois of the city built upon discourses of surveillance and embarrassment to serve their particular political goals. As I have explained in some detail elsewhere,71 upper‑class Irakliot politicians turned to city politics in order to affect the liberal politics they envisioned and to further broaden the divide between themselves and their rural rivals to political power, since the nascent Cretan Polity was a notably autocratic state. These politics were simultaneously justified and concealed by discourses of scientific sanitary reform. Egged on by the British military authorities, the municipal council began an ill‑starred campaign to effectively rebuild the city according to the contemporary rules of sanitation and city-building, thus initiating a forced segregation along the lines of class, race and ethnicity even before city planning laws of the Cretan Polity were put to effect.72 Despite the grand pronouncements, the realities on the ground were much different: Iraklion was an underfunded, understaffed municipality with a shabby infrastructure and a population continuously on the verge of epidemic. Public works finally produced a facade of central streets built according to the new precepts, lined with neo-classical mansions, whereas the rest of the city more or less remained in its former state.73

34The realities of urban life at the beginning of the century are equally glossed over by the aforementioned idiom of embarrassment. Elderly Irakliots still know a small street behind the main square of Liontaria (Lions), next to the old meat market, by its popular name: katroulosókako, meaning “piss alley.” According to them, “back in those days” the odour was so strong that you had to cross it with your nose pinched to avoid fainting. While Irakliots are ready to recount this story with considerable mirth, they are however quite sensitive to accusations of insufficient cleanliness or ineffective sanitation when made by outsiders. Several complaints have been heard recently in the city, for example, about the remarkable feat performed, after decades of badly orchestrated public works, of having the water pipes under the sewer ducts. Irakliots, old and young, receive this with a smirk and a sigh, as proof to the incompetence of the State. I have witnessed, however, a veritable eruption of insults when a tourist from New Orleans, sitting at a tavern table, exclaimed that putting a sewer pipe over a water pipe is what they do in his city―in Iraklion they use the same conduit. In another occasion, a female student replied with terse irony to a fellow Athenian student who commented on the perpetuity of public works in Iraklion: “listen here, friend, this is no luxury. We need this in order to survive.”

  • 74 See note 33.
  • 75 Osman Fazil, “Letter to the Chief of Police” manuscript, 20 July 1899, Vikelea Library Archives, A (...)
  • 76 Osman Fazil, “Letter to the Prefect [Georgios Maris]” manuscript, 27 October 1899, Vikelea Library (...)

35This element of cultural intimacy reproduces a tension between ideal realities aimed at by Western modernizing projects and necessities on the ground implied by authentic life in the past so characteristic of Cretan takes on modernity.74 This tension, as I pointed at above, has a genealogy that can be traced to the beginning of the century and continues to create conflicts between lived reality and legislative expectations. Accordingly, most of the people arrested for publicly urinating under the British military regime simply did so because their shops had no toilet facilities to speak of. It was these realities of urban lived space, however, that became criminalized even before sanitary provisions were in place to allow for a shift in practice. What was until then considered perfectly normal and convenient was turned overnight into a punishable practice for which one would definitely be arrested and fined.75 This habit, according to the authorities, caused “common disgust, but also seriously harms public health.”76 How much this reference to a common conception of propriety and health was not common at all is indicated by the amount of fines in the municipal ledgers billed to small shop owners in the city centre, who practically urinated in front of their own shops, after closing.

  • 77 J. N. Kampanis, “Report to the Mayor of Iraklion”, manuscript, 23 March 1901, Vikelea Library Arch (...)
  • 78 J. N. Kampanis, “Report to the Mayor of Iraklion”, manuscript, 23 March 1901, Vikelea Library Arch (...)

36City authorities, much like the Greek military junta of 1967–1974 did later, developed in response a punitive discourse that hinged on ideas of health, order, civilization and patriotism. Cleanliness and orderliness were paramount to the forging of a modern urban identity, even if this were to be restricted to a facade. Despite the apparent urgency with which the city authorities regarded the matter, some three years on in the regime, public provisions remained in the same sad state, as is apparent from J. N. Kampanis’s report cited above.77 Resistances in the first, as well as in the second instance, were not conscious efforts at opposing the letter of the law, but a performative, and often facetious response that tested the limits of the law and pitted convenience and custom against empty public pronouncements. For example, the complaints of the same Kampanis regarding the state of the ruins in the street leading from the port to the centre of the city, nowadays 25th of August Street are characteristic of this. The site of a much publicized slaughter of Christians, a revered space for Greek nationalism, full of symbolic import for both the liberation struggles of Cretan Christians and the civic pride of the city’s bourgeois classes, was continually “desecrated” by ordinary people who found it convenient to relieve themselves in the safety of the ruins.78 Similarly, in the village where the ethnographic cases at the start of this article are located, there are stories about locals who, exasperated with the enforced building of outhouses by the military junta of 1967, chose to build them outside the house, but in the middle of the public street, thus rendering the public space of the village a caricature of the civilizing vision of the establishment.

  • 79 Cf. Reed-Danahay 1993, p. 226.

37In the same way, jocular performative instances of toilet talk are acts that resist all tidy categorization into received political categories and any meaningful discussion of their political intentionality. Far from being ambivalent grudges against authority, they nevertheless maintain a critical affinity with non-conceptual aspects of necessity that unsettle not just the efforts of state authorities and scientific principles to organize it; they unsettle all aspects of the social. The reference to abjection is not a simple reference to some idealized authentic past. It is employed here as a basis to tease out the complexities of power in the local setting that result in discourses that are not subversive of modernity, but are nevertheless critical of it.79

  • 80 Cf. Hirsch, Stewart 2006.
  • 81 Cf. Corbin 1996, p. 61.
  • 82 See for example the case of Calcutta, Headrick 1988, p. 152.

38Such critique is threefold: first of all, it constitutes a historical discourse in both senses of the term, i.e. it is a discussion about historical change, but at the same time it is shaped by the historical events it references.80 Scatological jocularity could be seen therefore as a memory trope that is performed within a regime of historicity associated with civic reforms, and particularly sanitary reforms at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, and keeps probing the limits of its effectiveness in the present. This historical transformation is an aspect of abjection that most psychoanalytic and cultural-critical approaches miss, perhaps in favour of the private history of the subject, as I have already mentioned above. Post-structuralist readings, however, have brought into the picture the way that civilizing imperatives as historical processes effectively shaped the very private subject that cultural and psychoanalytical approaches are based upon.81 Secondly, scatological tropes problematize spatial divisions as inherent to temporal ones: the city versus the country is shown thereby as a metaphor for new versus old; not an arbitrary one, but one created by historical breaks such as the transition of Crete from the Ottoman administration to an autonomous state and its subsequent annexation to Greece, aided by foreign powers who were instrumental in shaping local subjects. Memories of such spatio-temporal shifts are referenced, as I have argued, in performative acts in the present. Thirdly, the ambivalent critique of modernity inherent in such tropes indicates how the abject is a produced division of a civilizing mission waged with the help of colonial technologies of sanitation that were equally technologies of rule―sets of techniques, regulations, ideas, that were tried and tested in colonial settings elsewhere.82 These technologies of sanitation and city improvement conceal the real condition of city and country and its continuation in post-Ottoman times behind cosmetic changes and their ideological support in ideas of progress and civilization.

  • 83 Herzfeld 1995, p. 222.
  • 84 Kalantzis 2019, p. 27.
  • 85 Newspaper Ethniki Foni, 8 October 1973.

39Overall, such instances of abject humour and ridicule constitute a culturally specific mode of perceiving and expressing the shortfall of civilizing imperatives in an idiom of ambivalent “practical occidentalism”83 so common in Crete and Greece at large. The language of mockery, wit and repartee summoned to deal with the local idiom of embarrassment opens informing vistas into the poetic ways through which locals try to reappropriate their integrity as subjects of overarching systems of signification and valuation by creatively reassessing local historical geographies.84 Much like the local wit who, confronted once again in a cafe lavatory by an embarrassed elderly Irakliot also suffering from prostate complaints, answered to the latter’s awkward remark “Fancy meeting you again in here” with adroit irony: “And where would you expect us to meet, in parliament or the stock-market?”85

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Bibliographie

Archival sources

ADIK – Archives of the Municipality of Iraklion – Vikelea Municipal Library, Iraklion.

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Certeau 1986
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Dermitzakis 1963
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Douglas 1966
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Dreyfus, Rabinow 1983
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Eliadi 1933
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Elias 1982
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Esty 1999
Joshua D. Esty, “Excremental Postcolonialism”, Contemporary Literature 40.1, 1999, pp. 22–59.

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Freud 1961
Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, New York, W. W. Norton, 1961.

Friedl 1962
Ernestine Friedl, Vasilika: A Village in Modern Greece, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962.

Friedman 1992
Jonathan Friedman, “Myth, History and Political Identity”, Cultural Anthropology 7.2, 1992, pp. 194–210.

Gallant 2002
Thomas W. Gallant, Experiencing Dominion: Culture, Identity, and Power in the British Mediterranean, Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.

Gavin 1848
Hector Gavin, Sanitary Ramblings: Being Sketches and Illustrations of Bethnal Green, London, John Churchill, 1848.

Greenblatt 1990
Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, London, Routledge, 1990.

Hartog 2015
François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, New York, Columbia University Press, 2005.

Headrick 1988
Daniel Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940, Oxford, OUP, 1988.

Herzfeld 1991
Michael Herzfeld, A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1991.

Herzfeld 1995
Michael Herzfeld, “Hellenism and Occidentalism: The Permutations of Performance in Greek Bourgeois Identity”, in James G. Carrier (ed.), Occidentalism: Images of the West, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 218–233.

Hirsch, Stewart 2006
Eric Hirsch, Charles Stewart, “Introduction: Ethnographies of Historicity”, History and Anthropology 16.3, 2006, pp. 261–274.

Home 1997
Robert Home, Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities, London, E. & F. N. Spon, 1997.

House of Commons 1899
Parliament, House of Commons, Great Britain Parliamentary Papers, Turkey: No. 1 “Further Correspondence Respecting the Affairs of Crete”, 1899.

Howes 2004
David Howes, Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, London, Routledge, 2004.

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Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity”, in Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality, Seattle, Bay Press, 1988.

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John Jervis, Transgressing the Modern: Explorations in the Western Experience of Otherness, Oxford, Blackwell, 1999.

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Konstantinos Kalantzis, Tradition in the Frame: Photography, Power and Imagination in Sfakia, Crete, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2019.

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Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York, Columbia University Press, 1982.

Lacan 2001
Jacques Lacan, Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001.

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Edward Lear, A Βook of Nonsense, 1846, London, Frederick Warne & Co, 1887.

Lear 2012
Edward Lear, The Cretan Journal, 1984, Limni Evoias, Denise Harvey, 2012.

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Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, New York, OUP, 1989.

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Colin McFarlane, “Governing the Contaminated City: Infrastructure and Sanitation in Colonial and Post-Colonial Bombay”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32.2, 1994, pp. 415–435.

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William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, Massachusetts, Harvard UP, 1997.

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Ioannis D. Mourellos, “Κρήτη (κοινωνικός βίος) [Crete (Social Life)]”, Μεγάλη Ελληνική Εγκυκλοπαίδεια [Great Greek Encyclopedia] 15, Athens, Pyrsos, 1931, pp. 164–166.

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Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864, Chicago, London, The University of Chicago Press, 1995.

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Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism”, The American Historical Review 99.5, 1994, pp. 1475–1490.

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Prashad 2001
Vijay Prashad, “The Technology of Sanitation in Colonial Delhi”, Modern Asian Studies 35.1, 2001, pp. 113–155.

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Deborah Reed-Danahay, “Talking about Resistance: Ethnography and Theory in Rural France”, Anthropological Quarterly 66.4, 1993, pp. 221–229.

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Yolande Triantafyllidou-Baladié, Το εμπόριο και η οικονομία της Κρήτης, 1669-1795 [Crete’s Commerce and Economy, 1669–1795], Iraklion, Vikelea Municipal Library, 1988.

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Sjaak Van Der Geest, “Akan Shit: Getting Rid of Dirt in Ghana”, Anthropology Today 14.3, 1998, pp. 8–12.

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Eleftheria Zei, Χώρος και φωτογραφία: Το Ηράκλειο από την Οθωμανική Αυτοκρατορία στην Κρητική Πολιτεία [Space and Photography: Iraklion from the Ottoman Empire to the Cretan Polity], Athens, Politistiko Idrima Omilou Pireos, 2005.

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Notes

1 Lacan 2001, p. 11.

2 Herzfeld 1991, pp. 24–25.

3 The prefix is not without further connotations and associations of the low hygiene standards in villages, as compared with urban environments. Therefore, the Lasithi plateau farmers would be casually mentioned in the past as kasogonatoi (dirty-kneed), because of the soil accumulating on their knees from prolonged kneeling necessary to tend to potato plants. Indeed, not many decades ago, the plateau was in a state of destitution, poverty, and ‘backwardness’, that came to symbolize in a way what is not urbane, civilized, and decent. This picture is now very rare; however, in this context, accumulated dirt from backbreaking agricultural work, or lack of hygiene, can still be associated with backwardness and, synecdochically, with rural life.

4 See Anagnostopoulos 2019; Argenti 2017; Bryant 2016; for a comparative case in Cyprus, see Argyrou 1997, p. 167.

5 Hartog 2015.

6 Hartog 2015, p. 16.

7 Certeau 1986, p. 4.

8 Lincoln 1989, p. 165; Douglas 1966, pp. 39–40.

9 Cohen 2005.

10 But see Freud 1961, p. 52.

11 Van Der Geest 1998, p. 9.

12 E.g. Douglas 1966.

13 Douglas 1966, p. 35.

14 Miller 1997.

15 Kristeva 1982.

16 Miller 1997; Kristeva 1982; Freud 1961.

17 Bakhtin 1984.

18 See for example Anderson 1995 for a discussion of how American colonial medicine produced grotesque Filipino bodies; Greenblatt on the grotesque body as element of dissent in early modern times (Greenblatt 1990); Norman O. Brown’s psycho-historical exposition of the connections between lower bodily functions and the prevailing spirit of Protestantism (Brown 1968).

19 Esty 1999, pp. 25–26.

20 Dreyfus, Rabinow 1983, p. 128.

21 Elias 1982.

22 Turner 2008, p. 78.

23 Jervis 1999, p. 37.

24 Greenblatt 1990, p. 60.

25 Anderson 1991.

26 Greenblatt 1990, p. 61.

27 Prakash 1994.

28 Corbin 1996, p. 90.

29 Prashad 2001, p. 155.

30 Friedl 1962, p. 42.

31 Just 1995, p. 296, italics in text.

32 Sutton 1998, p. 37.

33 One may perhaps argue that such criticisms of modernity may have their roots on widespread ideas of Western “degeneration” current in late 19th century and well into the first quarter of the 20th. A thorough account of the echoes of this theory in Greek state-making exceeds by far the aims and scope of this article. It suffices to say here that the idiom through which this degeneration is remembered and theorized locally is that of “luxury” towards essential “authenticity.” Western civilizing imperatives, it is proposed, are concerned with the inessential accoutrements of polite society, whilst the past of the island is portrayed as a time when people were closer to a naturalized essence of what is necessary to life. I show further down that this is the core of the ambivalences already described here towards the civilizing projects of the West.

34 Du Boulay 1976, p. 396.

35 E.g. Scott 1990.

36 Prashad 2001, p. 155.

37 Hartog 2015.

38 Svolopoulos 2005.

39 Svolopoulos 2005.

40 Newspaper Eleftheria, 12 February 1900.

41 Mourellos 1931, p. 164.

42 Eliadi 1933, pp. 36–37.

43 Howes 2004, p. 271.

44 Dermitzakis 1963, p. 85.

45 Triantafyllidou-Baladié 1988.

46 Cf. Prashad 1994.

47 Anagnostopoulos 2018, p. 710.

48 Dermitzakis 1962, p. 58.

49 House of Commons 1899, p. 130.

50 House of Commons 1899, p. 147.

51 Prashad 1994, p. 254.

52 Jay 1988, pp. 5–7.

53 Poovey 1995, p. 79.

54 Lear 1887, p. 21.

55 Cf. Friedman 1992, p. 195.

56 J. N. Kampanis, “Report to the Mayor of Iraklion”, manuscript, 23 March 1901, Vikelea Library Archives, ADIK 3.2/14‑70.

57 ADIK 3.2/4‑261, 15 July 1899.

58 Herzfeld 1995.

59 Home 1997; Prashad 2001.

60 Home 1997, pp. 94–95; McFarlane 2008, p. 416; see also Headrick 1988, p. 152 for a comparative case on Calcutta.

61 Clarke’s work was greeted in the most enthusiastic manner in diplomatic reports, and he was soon called to Chania―then capital of the autonomous island―in order to become, effectively, minister of public health to Prince George’s government. He was responsible for most of the reforms imposed by the Cretan Polity at the time. Clarke composed a detailed report on the sanitary condition of the city in the aftermath of the 1898 massacres that effectively pressed for the declaration of a humanitarian crisis on the basis of the sanitary conditions of the city (House of Commons 1899, p. 150).

62 Joyce 2003, p. 68.

63 E.g. Gavin 1848, p. 75.

64 Dermitzakis 1963, p. 89.

65 Lear 2012, p. 69.

66 Cf. Corbin 1996, pp. 60–61 for a discussion of similar moves in early modern Europe.

67 Fragkaki 1978, p. 42.

68 Zei 2005, p. 117.

69 Remarkably, the original source of this story is an article that appeared in the British Medical Journal in 1903, written by the same Captain T. H. M. Clarke, who by then had been promoted from sanitary officer of Iraklion to medical adviser to Prince George. Clarke comments, after describing in some detail the sewerage of Knossos palace: “The Spectator recently observed in a leading article that ‘the plain truth is that care for sanitation is one of the last teachings of wisdom that reach even the civilized.’ This quotation may serve to prevent us from overlooking the real importance of the broken drains and pipes at Knossos―namely, the strong additional proofs which they afford of a civilization so advanced that it has been attained to by few nations even in the present day.” (Clarke 1903, p. 599).

70 Clarke 1903, pp. 598–599.

71 Anagnostopoulos 2016; Anagnostopoulos 2018; Anagnostopoulos 2019.

72 Anagnostopoulos 2018.

73 Anagnostopoulos 2016.

74 See note 33.

75 Osman Fazil, “Letter to the Chief of Police” manuscript, 20 July 1899, Vikelea Library Archives, ADIK 3.2/14‑70.

76 Osman Fazil, “Letter to the Prefect [Georgios Maris]” manuscript, 27 October 1899, Vikelea Library Archives, ADIK 3.2/4‑597.

77 J. N. Kampanis, “Report to the Mayor of Iraklion”, manuscript, 23 March 1901, Vikelea Library Archives, ADIK 3.2/14‑70.

78 J. N. Kampanis, “Report to the Mayor of Iraklion”, manuscript, 23 March 1901, Vikelea Library Archives, ADIK 3.2/14‑70; cf. Anagnostopoulos 2018.

79 Cf. Reed-Danahay 1993, p. 226.

80 Cf. Hirsch, Stewart 2006.

81 Cf. Corbin 1996, p. 61.

82 See for example the case of Calcutta, Headrick 1988, p. 152.

83 Herzfeld 1995, p. 222.

84 Kalantzis 2019, p. 27.

85 Newspaper Ethniki Foni, 8 October 1973.

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Aris Anagnostopoulos, « Talking Filth: Abjection and Modernity in Post-Ottoman Crete »Bulletin de correspondance hellénique moderne et contemporain [En ligne], 4 | 2021, mis en ligne le 22 mars 2022, consulté le 16 avril 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/bchmc/831 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/bchmc.831

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Aris Anagnostopoulos

Honorary Lecturer, University of Kent, European Culture and Languages

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