Zambolis apartments

Zambolis apartments
For your holidays in Chania

Monday 22 December 2008

The olive harvest (Στις ελιές)

What would Greece be like if it didn't have any olive trees? First of all, the fields would be bare: vast expanses of dry brown fields in the summer, damp green fields in the winter, absolutely useless terrain, good for taking a dog out for a walk while the person holding the leash jogs ahead of them. There also wouldn't be any olives to eat; instead of a few black olives in a Greek salad, there'd be a few capers, walnuts or almonds. And there'd definitely be no olive oil, so all our dishes would be cooked in water. Our food would taste a lot as Gilbert, a Jamaican soldier in WWII Britain, describes the food he ate in my favorite novel "Small Island" by Andrea Levy:

"...every last one of us was too preoccupied with food. The only flesh we conjured was the sort you chewed and swallowed. This was war. There was hardship I was prepared for - bullet, bomb and casual death - but not for the torture of missing cow-foot stew, not for the persecution of living without curried shrimp or pepper-pot stew. I was not ready, I was not trained to eat food that was prepared in a pan of boiling water, the sole purpose of which was to rid it of taste and texture. How the English built empires when their armies marched on nothing but mush should be one of the wonders of the world. I thought it would be combat that would make me regret having volunteered, not boiled-up vegetables - grey and limp on the plate like they had been eaten once before. Why the English come to cook everything by this method? Lucky they kept that boiling business as their national secret and did not insist that the people of their colonies stop frying and spicing up their food." (Read the next (very funny) paragraph, also related to food.)

Luckily for us Cretans, it was never like this.


(browning onion, kalitsounia fried in olive oil, gardoumia, dakos)

Throughout this month, there has been a flurry of activity in the olive growing sector in Hania. Some varieties of olives are ready for harvesting in early December - but only if they have received adequate irrigation, and most olive trees growing in the town are not artifically irrigated, which means we must wait for the rain to fall. Olive oil producers waited patiently for the rain needed to give the olives a final growth spurt, which, by the end of summer, had already formed into little hard drupes as hard as pebbles. It must have rained before the olives are picked; if it hasn't, the olives will be too dry to produce a good ratio of olive oil per kilo of raw fruit. But olives are never picked in wet weather - this would increase the water ratio in the oil produced, and give a lower grade olive oil. This winter was a particularly dry season. The rain finally made its appearance in mid-November, lasting about a week. As soon as the rain stopped, the heat was on: everyone involved in the olive trade in Hania frantically began to harvest their olives for oil.

morning olive harvest
The day starts off like this (yes, that's my hand on the steering wheel)...

Every morning, as I take the children to school, I drive by olive fields. On the road, I pass countless pickup trucks, olive picking gear in tow: large nets to lay under the tree (usually black or green), a beating rod, a generator, among other bits and pieces. This means that the olives to be picked will be beaten, not allowed to drop naturally. Certain varieties (the one we call tsounates in Crete) are allowed to fall on their own, hence the nets, which allow the soil to breathe. They are laid over the ground below the trees and the owner of the filed goes there about once a week to gather whatever crops have fallen. This process is time-consuming, and it does not work for the lianes variety of olive, which has a stronger stem holding it onto the tree.

olive harvest olive harvest
These nice young men (they were Albanian) were very obliging when I asked if I could photograph them. Their payment is often made according to the quantity of olive oil produced. This encourages them to work as fast as possible.

The nets are laid carefully under the trees and the beating starts. This was once done by hand with a large stick, but times have changed: a noisy diesel generator is now an essential element of the olive picking season. As each tree is shorn of its fruit, the nets are gathered up and the olives are poured into sacks, leaves and all at this stage. The sifting process was once done by hand, but this has now been made obsolete with high technology and the modern olive press: the olives are sorted mechanically at the factory. The sacks are piled onto the truck, to be delivered to the olive press. This process is repeated on all the trees. If the trees are close to the road, the nets are laid on the road. No matter how carefully you drive, sometimes you can't avoid driving over a net. This has happened to me countless numbers of times, as I live in a village setting with narrow country roads.


The olives - along with some of the leaves from the tree - quickly drop off the branches when they are beaten with an electric beating rod.


The olive pickers are mainly foreigners who have made their home in Greece: Albanians, Romanians, Bulgarians. They make good money doing this work; the owners of the fields are Greek, but they more often than not have another (main) job and cannot pick their own olives, not even as a part time activity, unless they literally have nothing else to do in their free time.

Our olive trees are no fun to work with at all...

Olive picking is a very tiring job, it must be done in its season and it is usually performed in cold weather. And it all looks like an easy job if your trees are on a level field; try picking them on a steep hillside, where each row of olive trees is on its own little strip of land, barely wide enough to walk by...

olive press leaves
The olives are usually taken to a privately owned olive press located near the area they were picked; this one has a lot of customers waiting for their olives to be pressed. Notice the leaves on the left hand side of the building: they are used as fertiliser and a fire starter. Olive oil production also leaves sludgy residues which have to be disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner; it's not all as clean as it looks...
olives in sacks waiting to be processed into olive oil hania chania runoff from olive press

The olive trees get quite a beating from this rod (beating them by hand is very time-consuming and tiring, but much gentler the tree; it is hardly ever done now). This creates one more job for the olive pickers: the broken branches need to be cleared away from the field. This is what happen in the field before the olives get processed in the olive oil press. That's a totally different story. Check out Jude's blog to see the fresh olive oil pouring out of the press. What a sight...

olive grove after harvest
The end of the day - the olives have all been picked off these trees, and only the broken branches remain...

MAICh carries out a lot of research on olive cultivation, olive oil processing and the adulteration of olive oil. The findings are just as depressing as

"Greece devotes 60% of its cultivated land to olive-growing. It is the world's top producer of black olives and boasts more varieties of olives than any other country. Greece holds third place in world olive production with more than 132 million trees, which produce approximately 350,000 tons of olive oil annually, of which 75% is extra-virgin. This makes Greece the world's biggest producer of extra-virgin olive oil, topping Italy (where 40-45% of olive oil produced is extra virgin) and Spain (where 25-30% of olive oil produced is extra virgin). About half of the annual Greek olive oil production is exported, while only 5% of this quantity reflects the origin of the bottled product. In other words, only 5% of the Greek olive oil is exported as a trade mark and the rest is exported as a raw material while being processed and bottled in different countries, mainly Italy. Greek exports primarily target European Union countries, the main recipient being Italy, which receives about three-quarters of total exports" (MAICh study on organic and conventional cultivation of olive, 2008).

So there you have it, in a nutshell: Greece can't even be bothered to make an effort to market its own natural resources. The next time you buy olive oil bottled in Italy, you know where it's really from: Greece. Yet, there is hope: advances in knowledge and technology have led to greater success in the fight against adulteration of olive oil; progress in DNA technology can now detect whether olive oil is purely from one region as well as being able to identify purely extra-virgin olive oil and adulterated oil mixtures (ie olive and non-olive oil mixes).

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

13 comments:

  1. Oh. My. Gosh. As soon as I read this post, I went and got my bottle of olive oil to read the label. Sure enough, even though it says product of Italy on it, when I read the fine print (with a magnifying glass -- no kidding), it reads that "this product contains select high quality oils from Italy, GREECE, Spain, and Tunisia." Next time I'm at the store, you can bet that I'm going to be spending a lot of time in the oil section reading all the labels. LOVED this post and all the photos that went with it. Also, I enjoyed the quote from the story, especially the line about the veggies being gray and limp as if they'd been eaten before! I'd love to have some of your black eye peas and that salt cod. Oh gee, I'd like some of everything! :-)

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  2. Thanks for another interesting mini-vacation to your beautiful country. I type this after having four snow and ice storms in the last week, so this was ESPECIALLY welcome.

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  3. Hello, coincidentaley, I was going to write an article on the olive picking we completed yesterday. I will be commenting on the Greek/ Italy combo. Is it ok if I link to your site for more info? I shall wait for a reply. Please leave a note on my last comment on my site. Thanks, Jude

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  4. I would still love to go to the island of Kea some day to Aglaia's during the olive harvest. I imagine they still beat them with sticks.

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  5. Maria,
    This was so interesting. I didn't realize 60% of the land in Greece was used for olive growing.

    I didn't know about the rain either. A lot I don't know (but learned) about olives/olive oil.

    We have a friend from Italy that sends us olive oil from his trees each year. We feel fortunate and it's so yummy!

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  6. Maria, one of my favorite things to do in Italy is buy olive oil from roadside stands, or directly from the plant where it's made. I have never seen this in Greece. Am I looking for the right places, any tips. Euxaristo, Kalliope

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  7. It was nice learning about were my Olive oil came from,even my EVOO can says,"imported from Italy".

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  8. I can't believe that they don't wack the trees...our guys still do. I had no idea that there was another option. Also, thanks for the info regarding where most of Greece's olives and what happens to them! Wow.
    Our harvest went well and we sold half of our oil to our neighbors. My harvest photos are still in "draft" from about a month ago. My guys didn't mind being photographed either. :)

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  9. I love that our olive oil is used and contained in other countries' olive oil.

    It's the best, it's affordable and it's from our blessed country Greece.

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  10. Hi Maria ... I'm back again with a question. My sister arrives tomorrow for a Christmas visit, and I was planning to make chicken and rice soup for her to eat after her long airplane ride. Then I thought about Avgolemono, and thought I'd attempt to make it. My first thought was to look through your blog for advice, and I found where you used 3 eggs and 1/2 lemon. Do I just wisk those together and add to the soup and the end of cooking? Any advice? Help! :-)

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  11. hi Paula. i've left you an email message!

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  12. I finally had some more time to read your other posts. This one really caught my eye as I saw olive trees and how it's picked. It's nice that the olive pickers allowed you take pictures and a video even with their fast paced work. I have seen many olive trees in Turkey but never witnessed the picking. My parents have two trees in their garden in the mountains. We people in the Mediterranean region are so lucky to have great olives growing around, although I am not there and can't take advantage of it :( The freshly and locally made olive oil tastes sooooo much better than the one we purchase in stores.

    I didn't know that Greece is 3rd in the world's olive production. They could really take advantage of that. A lot of times these days the products we purchase are made in one country and have raw materials that are imported from somewhere else.

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  13. "...the fields would be bare: vast expanses of dry brown fields in the summer, damp green fields in the winter..." - a pretty good description of "the island" - no olive trees, so in the "old days" sesame oil was what people used instead. Loved the video - and your description of the olive harvest.

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