During the last decades, the fast and continuous changes in the way of living have alienate modern Greeks from previous habits of their everyday life, transforming them into a kind of folklore. But this does not affect the fact that these elements that tend to extinct, used to be an integral part of a forgotten way of living. One of these elements is the old home equipment, aka the devices of the household when electricity and water supply were kinds of luxury, especially on rural areas of Greece.A proper old-fashioned Greek household included utensils such as faucet, washtub, ice bucket, signboard, stove-oven, oil lamp, brazier, iron, mortar, etc.
The old fashioned faucet was a homemade construction, usually a tin, which functioned like the modern fountains for washing. Of course, in this particular case, the water did not come from a water supply system, but from buckets, pitchers or other containers that were transported there from a – near or distant – fountain. The washtub is the ancestor of the modern washing machines. The housewife or the maid (if we were dealing with a wealthy household) undertook the cleaning of dirty clothes using a soap. It is noteworthy that the washboat was also used as a bathtub. The icebucket, the fridge of those days, was the house’s supplier of cool and cold water, which was very important, especially during the summer, thanks to ice pieces bought from street vendors. A necessary ”gadget”, mostly on rural areas was ”pinakoti”, a wooden board used for baking. Other utensils of the old Greek household were the stone-oven which was used not only for heating but also for cooking, the oil lamp, the brazier (a portable and dangerous heater consisting of a pan or stand for holding lighted coals), a flat iron and other utensils suitable for cooking.