Know your Home: Cisterns - Style One
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served perhaps more mundane but no less important purposes. Throughout the 19th century, cistern systems caught and contained rainwater to provide homes with water for virtually every domestic task except drinking (and even that sometimes), and in many areas more homes were built with than without them. Even the White House had cisterns as part of its original water supply, one of which was rediscovered during renovations in the 1920s. Cisterns were usually built right against the house’s foundation, either under porches or on the exterior, with access to the basin through hatches at the top and to the water by means of pipes and taps in the basement. This is the era of my own cistern as well – it’s less impressive than the ancient ones, but I also haven’t fallen victim to a siege, so I’m not complaining. As homes were remodeled and connected to other water sources, cisterns were abandoned, either just closed off or used as receptacles for various unwanted items (this story from the New York Times from 1986 details some of the fascinating historical items that have emerged from cisterns over time).
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The first time I climbed down the (only slightly rickety) stairs into my house’s unfinished “Minnesota basement,” I noticed that one interior cinder-block wall looked as if it had been knocked in with a sledgehammer. Peering into the darkness through the snaggle-toothed hole, I found a large, sunken rectangle full of broken bricks, chunks of dirt, and occasional corpses (only rodents as far as I know). After a moment of thinking “what is this thing?”, I realized that this thoroughly revolting and unsanitary mouse necropolis was, in fact, the cistern where the original owners of the house stored water for washing, watering, and even cooking. While I’ll keep my deliciously uncontaminated city water, I’m glad we have a cistern down there, and I’ve even started cleaning it out when I think my wife and kids aren’t looking. Cisterns like mine are a part of a long history, part of our human heritage, but they also have exciting possibilities in the present and for the future.
In 13th century BCE Greece, the rulers of the citadel at Mycenae, in a doomed effort to preserve their home and civilization, constructed a subterranean cistern within their fortifications to ensure that their palace would have water in times of danger. Pitch black and supported by a corbelled vault, a staircase still leads down some 20 yards from
ground level to a now-dry platform (it’s much more impressive in person than in the picture), a testament to the vital importance of water and an eerie reminder of the mysterious demise of the entire Mycenaean
civilization only a few decades after the cistern was built. This cistern actually came late to the game – the oldest ones we know of date from the 3rd millennium, and they remained an important part of life, especially in dry climates, until quite recently. It was the system of cisterns at Masada, capable of holding some 10 million gallons of water, that allowed the rebels there to hold out against a Roman siege; the Cistern of Philoxenos in Constantinople supplied the city with water for a millennium until the city was sacked by the Ottomans; and at El Jadida, the Portuguese in the 16th century decided that even an armory was less critical than a cistern in times of siege. Why do my examples always seem to end in disaster, you ask? Guess who’s married to a military historian…
More recently, cisterns have
