čučavac

(Translation, Yugoslavia)

A kind of water-cleaned toilet where you shit squatting. It's a single piece of sheet metal, molded so that the water, when it's flushed, goes around the raised footsteps and into the hole. You squat on the steps and all your excrement should fall straight into the hole, in theory. In practice, many people miss, so a lot of it ends to the sides of the hole, or between the steps, and flushing doesn't help much. Generally, everyone prefers to avoid them.

I don't know of anyone who had one of these at their home, but they were notoriously installed in any place where you'd expect to share it with others - the old novogradnja from the forties/fifties where they had common lavatories (aka „wet knots“) on each floor, the movies, stations, public toilets, restaurants. vojska rarely used any other kind.

The floor around them would be always wet, because some of the flushing water would easily overflow, or they had to be hosed down to get rid of what flushing couldn't do. No problem if one wears boots.

The picture shows a much newer model, where that kind of flooding by a badly adjusted vukašin is prevented. It's the old model that used to be in all those places that was the problem.

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Mentions: 02-IX-1962., august 1967., Vacation, caravan way, 07-VII-1981., 28-VIII-2010., Borik, Kantina, novogradnja, vojska, Zmaj, in serbian