I love how straightforward the Greeks can be. Not in the icy, biting manner one associates with the Dutch or Germans, nor in the harsh, all-pervasive Slavic way, but in a disarmingly guileless, earnest, almost beseeching fashion.
It is immediately obvious that this note was written by a woman, most probably an elderly one, judging by the material evidence alone: two pens of different colours, the remarkably even spacing of the letters, and the calm, perfectly legible handwriting of someone who still believes that a handwritten notice is civilisation’s highest form of conflict resolution.
Had she been younger, she would undoubtedly have used many more exclamation marks—as many people do here, even in fairly formal communication—to make the urgency all the more urgent.
Unless, of course, it was written by a child who is doing particularly well in English at school and was encouraged by his grandmother to write it for the benefit of the building’s less Hellenophone residents. “Come on, Yorgaki, now your English can finally be of some use.” But considering that the Greek version is considerably longer than the English one, little Yorgos must simply have run out of vocabulary before he reached the more technical aspects of the recently completed plumbing repairs.
Or perhaps this, too, belongs to the great Greek tradition of hospitality: even when an unfortunate tourist has unknowingly created a problem, the communication somehow avoids sounding accusatory. It merely asks—almost pleadingly—that one refrain from making things any worse. Which, admittedly, is no small request in countries where one is generally expected not to throw toilet paper down the loo, but into the little bin beside it.
Yet the whole enterprise is threatened by a single letter. The capital A, immediately following three exclamation marks, has already begun to resemble an O. Thus an unsuspecting foreign tenant, returning to their Airbnb after an indulgent dinner of fava, skordalia, kolokythokeftedes, grilled octopus, several heroic helpings of tzatziki, two litres of house wine, and the generous slice of galaktoboureko that inevitably follows, may easily skim the notice and read “Only toilet paper, wipes, etc.” instead of “Any toilet paper, wipes, etc.” At which point the notice itself becomes a subtle act of infrastructural sabotage.
Still, there is something profoundly heart-warming about it. One cannot quite imagine such a note emerging from the staircase of a respectable apartment building on an equally respectable street—say, Prinzregentenstraße in Munich or Goldeggasse in Vienna—where the prose would likely begin with “To the person responsible…” and end with a delicately veiled legal threat copied verbatim from the house regulations.
The Greek version, by contrast, feels less like an accusation than a heartfelt appeal. It assumes that you are fundamentally decent, merely momentarily confused by the peculiarities of Mediterranean plumbing. And somehow, that strikes me as a very Greek kind of optimism.
July 2026