Housing in Byzland

Note to non-Byzlander readers -- the current year is 5176 AFC, or After the Founding of the City, referring to the traditional capital city Polis.

Author's note: Byzland, Polis, the ocean names, etc. are placeholder names, and a rough estimation of the weather in Polis can be found here. Additionally, Greek and Latin are used merely as placeholder languages for the as-of-yet still-to-be-constructed Byzic language, and their use does not imply that the Byzlanders spoke Greek or Latin.

The Evolution of Housing in Byzland

It must be noted that historians divide history into eras to make it digestible and easy to understand, but this does not mean that the inhabitants of the past viewed it that way. There was no dramatic switch between, for example, Ancient and Early Classical Byzland at 1650 AFC. Instead, think of history as a spectrum and these divisions as our best attempts to separate out common themes and tendencies.

Ancient Byzland (0 - 1650 AFC)

Basic "Three-Room" Pattern

The earliest houses in Ancient Byzland were built out of mud brick or other readily accessible local materials, and they tended to follow the same basic tripartite pattern.

The first room was known as the Public Room. While the room would often be walled off from the outside, it was not uncommon in urban settings for the room to be built as a colonnaded portico. In both cases, the floor would be elevated above the street level, often by one or two cubits, and you would need to use a ramp or stairs to reach the door. This is the room where residents of the house would host guests. Craftspeople would use this room as their shop, farmers might use it as a stable or for storage, and patrons would often meet their clients in this room. The family's public altar was always placed on the wall opposite to the door.

The next room was known as the Great Room. This room was often slightly taller than the other rooms in the house to allow for clerestory windows that would both let light and air into the house and allow for ventilation. This was the main living space for the residents of the house, and benches along the wall would serve as beds, tables, seating, and workspaces. Outside guests were not often allowed into this space, and the door to this room was never positioned in such a way as to allow passers-by to peer through the Public Room into the Great Room. There might also be a trap door leading to an underground cellar that could be used for storage and to keep things cool.

The third room was the Kitchen, which was often either completely or partially without a ceiling to allow smoke from the hearth and/or oven to escape and to allow water to be captured in the storage vessels. A small staircase or ladder would lead to the roof, which is where the family would sleep or congregate at night in the hotter months. The family might also keep awnings or other shade tents on the roof for protection against the elements.

Poorer houses would often merge the Kitchen and the Great Room or, in extreme cases, only have one room that merged all three spaces into one. Rural houses often did not have a dedicated Kitchen room, instead having outdoor hearths and ovens, and might have the ladder or staircase on the outside. Builders of farmhouses also tended to build an artificial mound and then build their home into this mound to provide protection from the elements.

Urban Dwellings

There were no true multifamily homes at the time, although extended families tended to live in compounds with shared walls or in multiple small dwellings arranged around a shared courtyard. Still, as urban settlements grew, these dwellings were often sold or rented out to non-relatives.

A larger or richer family might buy two adjoining dwellings, open a door in the adjoining wall between the Great Rooms, and wall off the Public Room to create a larger house. In this case, the purpose of the rooms would be determined by the intimacy gradient: the farther away from the entrance the room, the more private it was. One of the two kitchens may have also been converted into a walled garden.

By 1150 AFC, upper-class homes in the city often involved two three-room layouts next to each other. The Public Room in this layout began to be called the Entrance Hall and the Great Room began to be used as a reception room. The Kitchen equivalent was almost always a Walled Garden with a colonnade, and from there the three-room layout would be repeated in reverse, with the Kitchen, the Great Room, and finally the Private Bedroom. Roof access at this point was exclusively from interior staircases, and roofs tended to have railings and privacy lattices.

Polis also began to have multistory homes around this time, with the basic structure being the Public Room on the first floor, the Great Room on the second floor, and the family rooms on the third. The kitchen might be attached to the Public Room or set up on the roof in this layout. The walls would be approximately 2 cubits thick at the base and approximately 3 palms thick at the roof. While many were built out of mud brick, richer families began to import stone for these buildings, which were known as tower houses.

In smaller cities and towns and on the outskirts of Polis, upper-class extended families built more complex compounds and often began to have larger courtyards, multiple smaller walled gardens, and small ziggurats both to show wealth and to provide a focal point for the compound. These compounds were often known as palaces.

Water and Sanitation

Water was both vital to survival in Ancient Byzland and also destructive to the mud bricks that served as the main building material. Those who could afford to do so would often paint the roof and the base of their dwellings (if not the whole thing) in white lime plaster to make them more water-resistant, and some would build small channels in their roof to funnel the water to particular parts of the roof.

Typically, individual homes would collect rainwater in storage vessels in the kitchen. However, depending on the time of year and the weather, this might not be enough. Some homes had their own wells, often in the kitchen area, but most urban dwellers would collect water from the communal well, often located a block or two away. Water brought to the home would often be sorted into separate vessels, each with designated uses, and residents could pay someone to bring water for the well for a fee. Neighborhoods in Polis that were connected to the aqueduct system would often have communal fountains, and it was believed that running water would be safer to drink and cook with. Cooking and drinking water that had been stored was also typically boiled before use, with the belief that this made the water behave like running water and thus made it safer for use. Still, the upper classes preferred to drink watered down wine and strained table beer, while the lower classes mixed water with vinegar to make posca and drank unstrained beer. This wasn't because the ancient water was unsafe to drink (thanks to the boiling practices)

The ancient Byzlanders used a paste-like rudimentary soft soap, typically made of on lye from ashes, oils and fats, and sand or clay. Those who could afford it would purchase scented soft soaps from a soaper, but even the poorest would collect their ashes from the hearth and either exchange them for soap at the soapery or would make their own homemade soft soap. While they did not understand germ theory, they understood that this soap would work best for removing the grime of the day and believed that being visually clean was important.

This soap was also used in various purity rituals, including washing faces and hands with soft soap after rising for the day and before or after meals and using the latrine. If the monetary and water budgets allowed, ancient Byzlanders of all social classes would stand in a basin and douse themselves with water. The upper class may also have had a stone slab that would redirect the runoff water into a new storage vessel. In all cases, this runoff water was frequently reused, either for irrigation or for cleaning off the streets in front of the dwelling.

Residents of the palace compounds or rural homesteads would have access to their own latrines and cesspits. Residents in lower-class urban settings, however, would often resort to chamber pots that would be dumped out onto the street, where often a drainage channel in the center would be carved. The streets would often flood when it rained, and the runoff would carry the refuse into the river or the ocean. Upper-class residents would likely have a latrine in an alcove off of one of the rooms in their house. In multistory dwellings, the latrine in a floor made of stone may have opened directly onto an open cavity in the wall with a cesspit below, while mudbrick floors may have either had an opening onto a chute made of stone (sometimes the only stone construction in the building) or earthenware or simply relied on chamber pots. The wealthy would often have servants take the contents of the chamber pot to a river, a canal, or just to the fields to dispose of it so that the streets of their neighborhoods remained relatively clean and waste-free.

After using the latrine, the wealthy would clean themselves with water, if available. Earthenware vessels with long spouts were often used for this purpose. The less well-off might use rocks or pottery shards, sticks and wood chips, plant leaves or cobs, or even just their hands. All classes wash their hands with water and (if possible) with soft soap as a standard purification ritual.

Early Classical Byzland (1650 - 2650 AFC)

Basic "Courtyard Townhouse" Pattern

By this point, the Public Room was increasingly seen as obsolete in the urban townhouses. Instead, the main door led to the Entryway, which is often where guests would wash their hands in water and conduct other purity rituals before proceeding into the Courtyard. The Courtyard was the merger and evolution of the Great Room and Walled Garden of the ancients, with large water cisterns and storage spaces, colonnaded reception areas, and rooms arranged around the courtyard. The Courtyard was often slightly off-center, to provide privacy for the residents, and the main public space in the home was kept within line-of-sight of the doorway.

The Public Room was not completely excised from domestic architecture, however. Some urban homes still had a room or two accessible only from the street that could be used for a trade or rented out. Larger townhouses would take this farther by duplicating the courtyard layout. The Public Court would be centered on the Entryway, through which the family's public altar could be seen. The rooms surrounding the Public Court could be used for storage, the family's business, or receiving guests. The omnipresent intimacy gradient would be present here as well, with rooms such as the family's office screened off or, if the family was rich enough to have a second story, elevated above the atrium. An off-center passageway would then lead to the Domestic Court, which would be another courtyard with the family's water supply (often a rain cistern or a well, although families rich enough to pay for an aqueduct connection might have a fountain). More rooms would be screened off, according to the intimacy gradient. While there may be a staircase to the roof in the Public Court, there would always be such a staircase in the Domestic Court.

Families with a large enough staff to need dedicated servants' quarters would often build an extension to the side of the townhouse that roughly followed the old tripartite layout. A room accessible from the Entryway and often with a door to a side street would serve as the Servants' Hall, where staff would gather, eat their meals, receive deliveries, host the servants of the family's visitors, and prepare for events. Behind this would be the Servants' Court, a courtyard around which separate staff cubicles would be set up and where "off-duty" staff could pass their time. Finally, the Kitchen would often be located in the back and be connected to the Domestic Court through a discreet passageway.

Although single-story townhomes often had no windows to the exterior, with all light and air coming from clerestories or the courtyards, exterior windows were more common in the upper floors of multistory townhomes.

Tower Palaces

While some townhouses could have two or possibly even three stories and cellars were common, most were only one story tall. In Polis -- and increasingly in the other cities of the Byzlander Empire -- there simply was not enough space for the wealthy to build townhomes. However, enterprising families had begun to buy up adjacent old-style tower homes and knocked doors between them, creating units with enfilade rooms. Staircases were often walled off so that each staircase served just one unit and the roof. These became known as Tower Palaces.

The first floor was always rented out for commercial or mercantile use. The wealthiest tenants would rent out the second or third floor, with its high ceilings and easy ground access (as there were no elevators or fire suppression systems at the time), and higher floors would be rented out to progressively less wealthy (but still well-off) tenants. The outrageously wealthy might rent multiple floors, with the second floor being used as the Public Floor equivalent, the third as the Domestic Floor, and -- if the family had the money -- the fourth being used as staff quarters.

Custom-built tower palaces were sometimes built with a setback for each floor to provide private balcony/roof space, although this did make the upper-floor units even smaller. Otherwise, the roof space was either partitioned off for each stairwell or a shared communal space for the residents.

Tower Courts

One of the other innovations that was found in Polis around this time is the creation of the Tower Court. This was a type of apartment building that took the standard courtyard-layout townhouse and stacked them on top of the other. A shared entranceway would lead to a shared courtyard, from which a shared stairwell would be used to access the entranceways of each unit, usually one per floor (but sometimes two). The porticoed balcony would be used as the hallway to access the different rooms, with tenants usually erecting privacy lattices on the far end of the hallway to respect the intimacy gradient. As in other multistory buildings, the first floor was always rented out for commercial or mercantile use.

While rooms in tower courts were often rented by tenants who did not have the financial means to rent rooms in a tower palace, there was no social stigma associated with living in a tower court vs a tower palace. Indeed, many tenants were quite wealthy. However, the upper floors were often rented by those with less income, similar to tower palaces, and some buildings had one unit per floor on the second and third floors but two to four units per floor on the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors. Many tower courts also adopted the ziggurat-esque setback model of tower palaces, meaning that the units on the uppermost floors of these units could be quite small indeed.

Tenements

It might be seen as one of the ironies of history that the lower-class tenements and the upper-class tower palaces and courts of the Early Classical period developed at the same time and along very similar lines. Like almost all multistory multifamily buildings, the first floor was often rented out for commercial or mercantile use.

While tenements typically continued the traditional tripartite layout of public room, private room, and kitchen (although most kitchens were equipped with little more than a brazier), the specifics of each building could vary wildly depending on space and price point. Nicer tenements would orient the units so that all rooms had exterior windows, but cheaper ones would simply cram in as many units as possible. Nicer tenements might be built around a shared courtyard from which the various staircases to the units could be accessed, while cheaper units might have external stairs or fill the external courses with a wooden building that could also be rented out. Nicer tenements might provide small balconies, while cheaper blocks would not. Almost all tenement buildings had a unit built out of wood on the roof.

Naturally, landlords might also subdivide the units so that tenants could rent just one or two rooms, and sometimes more than one family would live in one unit, especially in the poorer areas. Some tenement buildings were built so that all rooms opened onto a porticoed exterior hallway, allowing tenants to rent the exact number of rooms desired but meaning that moving between rooms could only be done in the exterior hallway, leading many residents of such units to erect privacy lattices on the porticos. Some blocks may have even combined various floor plans, such as a tripartite unit with an interior hallway and a private porticoed balcony on the second and third floor and single rooms accessible only from the portico on the fourth and fifth floor.

Most tenements, no matter how nice, would only have at most a brazier for heat, and as such tenement-dwellers relied almost exclusively on cookshops located on the first floor or throughout the city. These cookshops offered a variety of dishes, depending on the price point, but usually provided fare that could be easily carried by the customer. Larger cookshops, however, might have had tables and chairs for their clientele, and many also sold posca, beer, wine, and switchel.

Water and Sanitation

Throughout the early decades of the Early Classical period, Polis suffered several devastating plagues, devastating summers, and horrendous droughts. Overuse of the local wells also began to dry up the local aquifer and allowed salt water to infiltrate the city's groundwater. This spurred a multi-decade public works project to bring in new sources of water, raise the street level to build water mains and a sewer system, and build redundant water sources and public sanitation amenities into the urban fabric.

By the end of the Early Classical period, most buildings had at least one latrine connected to the city sewer. Running water, often in the form of fountains, was typically available on the first or maybe second floor. Cheap tenements often either did not have a latrine or did not have enough for their inhabitants, while tower palaces might have a dedicated water fountain at the bottom of each stairwell.

The biggest impact on housing from this project, however, was the impact of raising certain streets to the second-floor level. If a building was multistory, the owner might convert a window into a door at the new street level. Single-story buildings either were converted into multi-story buildings or built entrance wells with ladders or stairs allowing people to access the entrance.

For the single-story buildings that were converted into two-story buildings by building a second level, the old building was now essentially a basement. Courtyards were not typically covered, creating a deeper well of cooler air from the newly subterranean levels. Some homeowners converted rooms into private cisterns or rented out the lower levels to tenants who were willing to exchange natural light for naturally insulated temperatures. These also became common places for servant's quarters, especially if the original courtyard was covered by a pergola or other privacy lattice, and an external staircase down to the basement level was not uncommon in wealthier areas.

However, some property owners either filled in the open spaces of the original structure or, in cases where access to the subterranean rooms was seemed potentially useful but a ground-level courtyard was still desired, walled off the basement porticos and filled just the courtyard. These properties are currently the best-preserved examples we have, but they were not seen in quite as positive a light by the Early Classical Byzlanders. Instead, stories where a homeowner discovers a trap door under a rug and finds that criminals had been living under their house or finds dead bodies of the previous residents, usually somehow still mid-feast, became staples of the literature from that period. Additionally, sometimes the structures were not designed to hold up the weight of another building and so suddenly one's townhome would collapse into a sinkhole that was actually the public court of the building that had been there previously. Because the street raising project had mainly focused on wealthier neighborhoods, the less well-off parts of the city did not experience these events, adding a level of suspicion and thus classism to the upper-class discourse.