OLIVES SACRED AND PROFANE

Silently, the olive is reading within itself the Scriptures of the stone.
Yannis Ritsos, “Lady of the Vines”

"While European horizons darken under the haze of uncertainty and disorder, Italy offers the world a marvellous spectacle of composure and discipline, of civic and Roman strength. Nations who do not know us, or who know us merely through literature, are today amazed by our economic, political and military presence... It is, therefore, a great olive branch that I hold high, between the end of the fourteenth and the fifteenth years of the Fascist Era. But beware, this olive tree grows in a vast forest: a forest of eight million well-sharpened bayonets, held by men who are young, intrepid, and strong"
Benito Mussolini, speech of October 24, 1936

Apath runs past my house, angling up the steep slope between dry-wall terraces faced with granite and pink limestone, where grape vines climb trellises of wild chestnut branches bleached by the sun to the color of bone. On a map of the area drawn by French surveyors at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after Napoleon had pocketed Liguria during his conquest of Italy, it appears as an “ancient roadway.” It’s at least as old as the Middle Ages, and a local historian believes it dates to Roman times, perhaps even to the Iron Age. These days it’s only traveled by a few elderly farmers; the earth is soft underfoot between the uneven cobbles, and large stretches of its course are overgrown in summertime by clover and thyme and wild mint. Yet the landscape still respects this ancient route: the terraces defer to its straight, sharp vector, and the medieval farmhouses on either side face toward it like people around a campfire, glad for its company and movement and clatter of trade, its news from the wider world. The path was here before every other thing in this landscape, and everything is oriented to it.

Everything except one. As the path crosses a saddle on the hillside a hundred meters above my house, a charmed spot where the sunlight lingers in the afternoons and spring violets bloom weeks earlier than in the valley below, it makes a small horseshoe bend, where centuries of travelers have taken five extra steps to avoid something in their way. This ancient obstacle is an olive tree, squat and thick-trunked like the local farmers, its partially exposed roots gripping the soil like a pair of old hands. The bark is pierced with holes made by woodworms, birds, nails, and what may have been bullets (during World War II, partisans sometimes hid from the Fascists and Nazis inside the hollow trunks of giant olive trees). Inside the trunk there’s a patch of charred wood from some wildfire beyond living memory, which must have devastated the tree. But in the fiercely patient way of olives, green shoots grew up from the charred remains and the tree was reborn. Like the mythic olive tree on the Acropolis cherished by the Athenians as the talisman of their city, which burned in the Persian sack of 480 BC but sprouted anew the next day from its smoking stump, a sign that the city would survive and prosper despite the disaster. Or like the olive tree at the head of the bay in Ithaca, which Odysseus sees when he finally returns there after his epic voyage, the one fixed point in a landscape altered by long absence, which tells him that he’s home.

Until I moved here ten years ago, this detail made no sense to me: why would Homer have chosen an olive tree to make Odysseus realize he’s back in Ithaca, and not, say, the generous curve of the bay, or the familiar silhouette of the surrounding hills? Then I began to notice the olive tree on the hill behind my house as I returned each day from my own modest odysseys. Somehow it was that tree, and not the old stone path or the shape of the horizon or even the roofline of my house, that I looked for. It seemed natural to think of the tree in mythic terms. It has watched a procession of peasants, priests, Napoleonic soldiers and Renaissance mercenaries, highwaymen and barefoot saints walk down this roadway and vanish into the sandstorm of time. It seems as permanent a part of this landscape as the hillside itself, the pink limestone cliffs across the valley, or the bright blue ribbon of sea beyond them, where Corsica floats like a dream on clear mornings. Yet despite the tree’s mass and hoary tenacity, you know it’s mortal: it can be killed back by drought or poison, or cut off tomorrow by frost or a saw. The rings in its trunk mean more than a geologic record, the neat strata on a canyon wall: their lean and fat years capture the history of this community, the hardships and plenty of people who have tended this tree for generations, and in turn have been fostered by it. Until recently its oil lit every home in the village, made machines run smoothly, cured the villagers’ ailments. Its oil still feeds them, and its branches hang in their houses throughout the year, distributed at Eastertime by the parish priest as reminders of patience, courage, strength. This olive tree stands for our community, and its oil is the essence of this place.

That a tree can live so long, and spin its wondrous juice from photosynthesized sunlight and a little rainwater sucked from the rocky soil, is itself miraculous. No wonder the ancients held this lifegiving, wondrously tenacious tree to be sacred, and its oil to be the gift of Athena, Aristaeus, and Hercules. And no wonder this vital active ingredient of the classical world seeped deeply into the three great monotheistic religions which arose there, giving the rites of the Hebrews, Christians, and Muslims the luster of oil and filling their sacred texts with images of gnarled, gray-green trees.

COOKBOOKS, LIKE HISTORIES, are written by the victors. When the Germanic tribes of northern and eastern Europe overran the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, they revolutionized its culinary fashions and brought the revenge of animal fat on imperial oil. These woodland hunters and pastoralists, who dressed in skins and furs instead of linen togas and silken tunics, introduced a Germanic nouvelle cuisine based not on the Greco-Roman triad of bread, wine, and olive oil but on meat, beer, and animal fat. The tastes of the new masters of empire soon caught on. Pork was included together with oil in the annona, the distribution of free food made to Roman citizens living in the capital. Forests came to be measured not in hectares but in hogs—the space that a pig grazed in a day. On illustrated calendars, December scenes of the olive harvest familiar to the Greeks and Romans gave way to pigs battening on woodland acorns, and the hog slaughter. Classical authors, who had formerly described the barbarian predilection for animal fat with bewilderment or disgust, now celebrated it: Anthimus, a learned philosopher and physician at the court of Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, described the wondrous qualities of lard, which he said the northlanders used as a dressing for vegetables and every other sort of food, and even ate raw as a kind of cure-all: “For them it is such a remedy that they have no need for other medicines.”

In the sea of barbarian beer, butter, and lard that washed over the ancient empire, Christian monasteries and cathedrals formed isolated islands of old-fashioned oil expertise. Olive oil remained a vital ingredient in the worship, economy, health, and daily diet of the Christian clergy, and through them, in the lives of the faithful. To make their holy oils and light their churches, monks and priests needed steady supplies of olive oil. To this end, church councils decreed the protection of olive groves, sometimes prohibiting the cutting of even a single tree. Olive oil was often used as an alternative currency, and commanded a premium price: in high medieval contracts, three to five liters of oil had the same value as a fat hog. Monk-agronomists tended the olive groves and made oil on their communal lands according to the advice of Cato, Columella, and other classical authorities, whose tracts they could consult in their monastic libraries. As the Germanic tribes converted to Christianity, their national diets entered into tension with the dictates of the Church, especially during fast days, when Christians were forbidden to eat meat and animal fat. For 100 to 150 days each year—Fridays, the forty days of Lent, and a range of other holidays and vigils that were determined by local custom—good Christians used olive oil instead of suet or lard to cook and season their food.

Making olive oil required some old-time Greco-Roman skill, which the barbarians often lacked. In his Dialogues, Gregory the Great tells a story from the life of Sanctulus of Norcia, a sixth-century priest who lived in what is now Umbria shortly after the area was conquered by Lombard war bands. Sanctulus arrived at an olive mill one day and asked its pagan Lombard owners to fill his oilskin. These rough men, who had struggled all day at their press without obtaining so much as a drop of oil, thought Sanctulus was mocking them and cursed him loudly. The imperturbable saint merely smiled and said cheerfully, “Is this how you pray for me? Come, fill my skin and I will leave you.” As the Lombards renewed their insults, Sanctulus glanced at the press and saw that no oil was coming out. He asked for a bucket of water, blessed it, and then, with all eyes on him, threw it over the press. “And such an abundance of oil ran forth,” the hagiographer concludes, “that the Lombards, who before had long labored in vain, now had enough oil to fill not only their own vessels, but also his skin. Their hearts were filled with gratitude, because the holy man, who had come to them begging for oil, was now, through his blessings, supplying in great abundance that which he himself had come to find.”

Sanctulus’s help was probably more technical than celestial: experienced millers commonly threw hot water on their presses to increase yields, especially during the second pressing, when they coaxed a few last drops of oil from the nearly spent pomace. (The expressions “first pressed” and “cold pressed” once distinguished high-quality oil extracted from fresh olives from oil made with the overheated dregs. Nowadays these terms are largely obsolete, because all true extra virgin oil is made from fresh olives milled at low temperatures, and most of it isn’t pressed at all, but centrifuged.)

Olive oil was also an essential fuel in churches, burning in lamps at altars and saintly shrines. Some large churches consumed huge quantities: in the Lateran basilica during the fifth century, 8,730 oil lamps burned around the clock, all year long. Olive oil was preferred to other fuels because it was long-lasting, gave off a clear, brilliant light, and was odorless—the pork fat customarily burned in the lanterns at the ninth-century abbey of Fulda smelled so foul that its studious abbot Rabanus Maurus, who certainly burned much midnight fat himself, begged the Carolingian king Louis the Pious for an olive grove in Italy, to light his church in a more seemly and fragrant way. No doubt agreeing with Rabanus, well-to-do worshippers throughout Europe willed money gifts or supplies of oil to churches, to fuel lamps that would burn perpetually for the salvation of their souls. Sailors and traders who arrived in the port of Venice, following an ancient tradition, left money or oil to fuel the altar lamps of the Basilica of San Marco. Elsewhere the faithful bequeathed olive trees or entire groves to a church, to supply oil for its lamps. When a group of knights rode through Puglia in 1147 on their way to the Holy Land during the Second Crusade, they stopped at the Bari cathedral to pay their respects to Saint Nicholas, patron saint of the city, to whom they deeded the oil of forty olive trees in perpetuity, on the condition that a lamp with their oil be kept burning continuously until their safe return. Such bequests often stipulated that the gift be void if oil were used that had not come from the deeded groves—evidence of a brisk trade in ersatz lamp oil, perhaps cut with liquefied pork fat.

While in the Bari cathedral, the knights no doubt collected some oil as well, to preserve them during their upcoming ordeal in the Holy Land. The bones of Saint Nicholas, which had been transferred there from Turkey sixty years earlier, were celebrated throughout Europe for the miraculous oil they exuded, said to cure countless diseases. Nicholas’s grave was one of many sites in Europe and the Middle East where the relics of a saint gave off a holy oil, as sweet-smelling as the flowers of Paradise, which might spring up like a holy gusher at the anniversary of the saint’s death. Even the oil that burned in the lamps beside saintly shrines frequently had sacred power. Perhaps because of olive oil’s well-known tendency to absorb tastes and fragrances, as well as its time-honored associations with divinity, lamp oil was believed to soak up the sanctity of the shrines where it burned, becoming the essence of holiness. Medieval pilgrims eagerly collected this substance, known as “the oil of the saints” or “the oil of prayer,” at holy places across the Christian world, and brought it home in small bottles of silver, lead, or terra-cotta known as ampullae, which are still found in the treasuries of many European churches, some containing traces of holy oil. This oil also made the ideal preservative for saintly relics; in eleventh century Rome, Christ’s foreskin and umbilical cord (which He evidently left behind when He ascended bodily to heaven) were reverently stored under oil in the pope’s private chapel. Saintly lamp oil was held in such regard that some Monophysite heretics drank it during the Mass instead of communion wine.

To this day, the bones of Saint Nicholas are still believed to exude a holy, healing oil, which the cathedral clergy collects each year in a solemn May ceremony. After the crypt in Bari was renovated in the 1990s, however, the quantity of liquid has dropped off sharply; today the priests only manage to sponge up a few precious glassfuls, which they dilute with several gallons of holy water and distribute to the faithful. Cutting Nicholas’s holy oil doesn’t seem to trouble the Catholic Church, which is less concerned about oil purity than in former times: Pope Paul VI ruled in 1973 that vegetable oil could be used instead of olive oil in the sacramental anointing of the sick.

Even in the Middle Ages, for all its holy resonance, olive oil remained a slippery substance, semantically and symbolically, and it was possible to have too much of a good thing. Because it had been widely used in Greco-Roman baths, gymnasia, amphitheaters, and temples, where it was a vital active ingredient in athletics, hedonism, flashy sexuality, and religious sacrifice, olive oil retained a whiff of paganism that Christians sometimes found offputting, even threatening. The Church attempted to coopt some of these symbolic valences, applying chrism and other holy oils to the bodies of the faithful at baptism, confirmation, exorcism, and extreme unction, which theologians were quick to point out made them athletes of Christ in the contest against sin and evil. However, uneasy memories remained trapped in olive oil, and the strict regulation of its use as a skin lotion in early monastic communities suggests its lasting heathen appeal. A monastic rule of the fifth century prescribes severe punishments for monks who cover themselves in oil after a bath, and enjoins, “Do not permit anyone to spread your body with oil, except in cases of grave illness.” Ascetics like Saint Anthony, the formidable desert hermit, demonstrated their superiority to paganism and the wiles of the flesh by renouncing a well-oiled body forever: Anthony ostentatiously refrained from applying any oil to his limbs, much to the amazement of his contemporaries.

Though the people might renounce oil during their daily routines, their miracle stories, dreams, and fantasies suggest that they still yearned for a good oiling. In the sixth century Life of Saint Radegund, the saint appears in a dream to a nun dying of dropsy, and orders her to undress and climb into an empty washtub. Radegund pours oil on the dropsical nun’s head, and dresses her in new clothes. The next morning the nun awakes, her hair still fragrant with Radegund’s wondrous oil, to find she has been healed of her disease. The fourth-century Egyptian holy man Macarius, famed for his asceticism, cured a virgin who had been transformed into a mare by sorcery, by rubbing oil over her entire body—a ticklish task even for a good ascetic to tackle without at least a squirm of concupiscence. Perhaps the most vividly pagan oil miracle appears in the Passion of Saint Perpetua, the strange, troubling tale said to have been written in prison by Perpetua herself, just before she was martyred by wild beasts in the arena in Carthage in 203 AD. One night, the story relates, Perpetua dreamed that a Christian deacon named Pomponius came to her cell, took her hand, and led her to the amphitheater, where a huge crowd of people were watching from the stands. “And there came out against me a certain ill-favored Egyptian with his helpers, to fight with me. Also there came to me comely young men, my helpers and aides. And I was stripped naked, and I became a man. And my helpers began to rub me with oil, as is their custom for a contest.” Perpetua defeats the Egyptian, tramples his head to signify her triumph, and claims the victor’s prize: a staff with golden apples attached to it.

Freud would have had a field day.

At any rate, the sacred role of olive oil in hagiography tracked the widespread popular use of olive oil to cure a range of maladies. Medieval pharmacists and apothecaries, following the advice of Hippocrates, prescribed olive oil against numerous ailments, from skin disease to digestive disorders to gynecological complaints, and used it as a base for numerous philters and unguents; medieval formularies mention oil-based extracts of scorpion, viper, stork, bat, fox, and other medicinal creatures. Some authorities prescribed a hot bath followed by a full-body rubdown with olive oil to cure kidney stones and seizures, and recommended submerging the lower half of the body in oil as an antidote against certain poisons. Olive oil, taken internally, was considered an effective cure for many ailments, including intestinal worms, snakebite, and even insanity, though one medical writer cautioned that oil not be given to people of a choleric disposition. Monastic cellarers believed olives and oil to be effective in reestablishing a proper balance among bodily humors, and sometimes prescribed olive oil to control violent impulses or sexual urges, which were thought to result from an excess of hot and moist humors in the blood. Doctors and holy men alike used oil against leprosy, blindness, and demonic possession, wives fed it to their husbands to free them from the wiles and incantations of prostitutes. Occasionally, holy oil and oil of the saints could even resuscitate the dead.

Yet olive oil was also employed in evil spells and incantations. The Church issued frequent bans against the use of consecrated holy oils by sorcerers and magicians; in the year 810, for example, the chapter of the cathedral of Tours ordered priests to guard the holy chrism vigilantly, because of the widespread belief that any criminal who managed to anoint himself with it could never be brought to trial. And there was a fine line between holy oil and snake oil. In the 430s, a monk appeared in Carthage carrying a martyr’s bone steeped in oil. Sick people and cripples that he dosed with the oil seemed to recover, at least as long as the monk was with them, but after he left they invariably relapsed. The citizens of Carthage eventually decided that his supposed cures were the result of demonic hallucinations rather than divine healing, and the monkish grifter skipped town.


I SAT WITH Ehud Netzer, archaeologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, on top of Herodium, the conical 300-foot hill where he had recently uncovered the tomb of Herod the Great. We were eating a lunch of olives, pita bread, and bitter onions, and looking toward the purplish haze of Jerusalem in the distance. Here and there in the lowlands rose the minarets of bedouin villages, surrounded by sandy sprawls of corrugated iron and raw concrete, while the neat ovals of tile-roofed houses in the Jewish settlements—Tekoa, Nokdim, and Eldar—occupied the nearby hilltops, like tiny fortifications. To the east and south, the naked folds of the Judean Hills rolled out toward the horizon, incandescent under the desert sun. Here and there were small olive groves, pale ridges of green on the sun-baked soil. That trees could survive in such fierce conditions seemed impossible.

Yet survived they had, and even thrived, since antiquity. Tekoa’s olive oil was famous in Old Testament times; in a yearly ceremony after the olive harvest, it was sent in wagons to Jerusalem, where it was used in the Temple for ritual offerings and to light the great Menorah.

When I said this, Netzer grunted and tossed a handful of pits down the slope. “Olive trees are power,” he said with surprising vehemence. “People here, both Palestinians and Israelis, grow them to control the land—to occupy it.”

He said he’d been watching the groves grow up around Herodium for decades as he excavated the site, and their advance had become a constant reminder of the social turmoil and latent violence of this land. For years at a time the Israeli army had denied him access to the area, fearing Muslim attacks, and Netzer worried about losing access to it permanently, as had happened in Jericho, one of his most important archaeological excavations, when the Palestinian Authority assumed full control there after the Second Intifada in 2000. The risks of working here were real. On July 3, 1982, David Rosenfeld, an American-born Israeli settler, was murdered at Herodium. The killers, who stabbed Rosenfeld over one hundred times, were two local bedouins, one of whom worked in Netzer’s excavation crew. “I was very close to the murderer’s old father,” Netzer said sadly. “Two days after David’s death, a group of Israelis and Americans, Arabs and Jews, washed away the caked blood. We lit an oil lamp and said Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.”

At the same time, Netzer also felt under pressure from Jews. The day after David Rosenfeld’s funeral, Jewish activists occupied a new outpost, El-David, on a neighboring hilltop, in reprisal for the murder. (The community later changed its name to Nokdim.) “Instead of panic and fear on the part of Jews,” the community’s website stated, “the Arabs got a new settlement and new settlers.” As if this wasn’t enough, Netzer received a visit from another ultra-orthodox group, called Atra Kadisha, which defends Jewish graves, sometimes by force, against disturbance of any kind, by archaeologists and road-builders alike. In the back of his mind, he said, was the threat that Atra Kadisha might shut his excavations down.

Year after year, around Herodium and in other parts of the West Bank, Netzer had watched olive trees being planted by the opposing factions, until their beauty had become tainted in his mind. “Now I see their other side. I see power struggles, I see places where rock-throwers and killers can hide. In my mind, this universal symbol of peace, for Jews and Arabs alike, has become a picture of conflict, hatred, danger.”

After the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel occupied most of the West Bank territory, which contained an estimated 10 million olive trees owned by Palestinian farmers. The Palestinians continued to tend their trees more or less undisturbed until in 2000, the year of the Second Intifada, when Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers, citing security concerns, began to burn, cut down, and uproot olive trees in many parts of the region, particularly near roads and Jewish settlements, and along the borders with Jordan and Syria. Since then, hundreds of thousands of olive trees owned by Palestinians—some sources put the number as high as half a million—have been destroyed, in what the liberal Israeli press calls the Olive Wars.

The destruction has accelerated dramatically since October 2005, when Israel began building the West Bank barrier (which many Palestinians refer to as the “racial segregation wall”), more or less following the Green Line, the border between Israel proper and the West Bank territories. This network of walls, ditches, barbed wire, and other obstacles, which in places is sixty meters wide, eight meters tall, and resembles the Berlin Wall in all its Cold War grimness, has intensified the destruction, and put many other groves off limits to their Palestinian owners. Israeli settlers have been accused of stealing Palestinian olives, both already harvested and directly from the trees, sometimes with the tacit approval of the Israeli army.

Christians are caught up in the Olive Wars as well. Two days after speaking with Ehud Netzer in Herodium, I visited Aboud, a town northwest of Jerusalem, to meet Father Firas Nasib Aridah, a Jordanian-born Catholic who is the parish priest of Our Lady Mother of Sorrows, the town’s church.

“So you actually did come!” he said when he saw me. On the phone he’d instructed me to visit Aboud with a Palestinian driver and by daylight, “to avoid any unpleasantness on the road,” as he’d put it. Aridah has close-cropped reddish-brown hair, a booming voice, and moves like he talks, swiftly and decisively. Despite his cassock, he has the energetic air and upright carriage of an athlete, or a soldier.

After showing me around the small church, with its naïve stained glass windows and a lectern made from an ancient olive tree destroyed by Jewish settlers in 2000, he walked briskly toward the edge of town to show me the scene of his dramatic recent confrontation with the Israeli army. Along the way the townspeople, many wearing checked keffiyeh headdresses, called out to him, addressing him as abuneh, which in the local Arabic dialect means both “patriarch” and “man of God.” He stopped to heft babies, pat shoulders, and distribute good-natured jibes in Arabic. He laughed frequently. “If I’m not laughing, I’m not a real priest,” he told me. “Laughing trains many muscles that you don’t train any other way.”

Aridah explained that his town has 1,300 Muslims and 900 Christians, who for centuries have coexisted in tolerance and mutual respect. “They work and shop and travel together, send their children to the same schools. Muslims celebrate Christmas and Easter with us, in the multipurpose room of our parish, and Christians celebrate Ramadan and [Eid al-]Adha in a hall near the mosque. And Christians and Muslims harvest their olives side by side. Even the poorest people bring a bottle of their first olive oil to our church, to be used as a sacrament.”

The West Bank barrier threatens to disrupt this ancient equilibrium. At the edge of town, the road we were walking on ended in a berm of raw earth, thrown up by Israeli bulldozers to block traffic into the area near the barrier. We climbed the berm and surveyed the terraced olive groves and pasturelands beyond. A reddish swath cleared by the dozers ran through them like a scar.

Aridah said that 5,100 of Aboud’s trees had already been destroyed in the work so far, and that if the barrier were completed, Aboud’s inhabitants would be cut off from a further 1,100 acres of village land, with 10,000 more trees.

“Some families lost everything to the barrier. Generations have supported their families from these groves. Many families eat between forty and sixty liters of oil per year. Now some have to buy their oil, or use cheap seed or palm oil instead because they can’t afford olive oil. Plus there’s the lost income. On a good harvest year, one olive tree can produce $200 in profit, through sales of the oil, table olives, and olive oil soap. For our families, the olive tree isn’t just a symbol of life, it is life.”

We descended the far side of the berm and walked into the groves between the village and the wall line. The trees were squat, healthy, thick-trunked, with reaching dark limbs that seemed blackened by the relentless sun. The prickly pear cacti and yellow fieldstone made me think of Puglia, until the muezzins of the area began the call to prayer.

Ever since the borders were closed to Palestinians, Aridah said, many people lost jobs they’d held in Israel, making the income from these trees all the more vital. “Without it, many young people can’t get an education. A number of men in their twenties and thirties aren’t able to marry, because they don’t have enough money to ask for the bride’s hand with pride. People can’t build homes. This seems to be the Israeli strategy: to destroy the society from below, to cut it at the roots. They are killing us, indirectly, through our trees.”

Aridah paused, as if sensing he’d gone too far. “Look, I have good relations with everyone. I have friends in Beit Aryeh and Ofarim, the nearest Jewish settlements, even though they were built on Aboud’s land, I talk with generals in the Israeli army, and with common soldiers—I respect them, and they respect me. Soldiers have orders, and I have to carry them out. We just want a basic level of justice and dignity.”

We walked past the last trees, into the trough cleared by the dozers. Aridah stopped in the churned, reddish marl, where there was no sign that anything had ever grown, and pulled out a stack of photos, creased and blurry, taken the day the Israelis came. He flipped through them, showing me how the bulldozers had advanced, with the Israeli army in the lead. How the soldiers in riot gear with assault rifles at the ready had formed a line, here where we now stood, and paid out a coil of razor wire. And how he and the villagers had knelt before them, and planted a tiny olive sapling in front of the soldiers’ steel-toed boots.

“We presented them with this peace offering, and said, ‘All we ask is that you give us what we need to live.’”

Aridah’s last photo showed the tiny tree, crushed under a solder’s boot.

“Soldiers have their orders,” he said, glaring at the image. “But I hope they didn’t include this.”

THE GREEKS EAT more oil than any other nationality, twenty-one liters per capita every year as compared with thirteen liters in Italy and Spain, one liter in Britain, and a little less than a liter in the United States. Among Greeks, the inhabitants of the island of Crete consume (and produce) the most oil. And among Cretans, the inhabitants of Kritsa, a village of 2,800 people in the southeastern part of the island, take the prize, eating about fifty liters per person per year. Kritsa can fairly claim to be a world capital of olive oil.

The king of Kritsa is Nikos Zachariádes, a pugnacious ex-policeman who returned to his native village after thirty years of service in the food fraud division in Athens, and threw himself body and soul into oil. Zachariádes is a fireplug of a man with a balding head, a pug nose, and slightly bulbous eyes that fixed me in a fierce glare, his forehead creased with concentration, when we met in Kritsa one bright January morning in 2011. For a moment, caught in that glare, I inadvertently pitied the food fraudsters who had run afoul of him in the past, and at the same time worried a little about his blood pressure. He asked me why I was interested in olive oil. As he listened to my answer, his worry beads clacking softly in his fingers, his brow smoothed, and his features relaxed into a knowing smile. And then Nikos Zachariádes gave me a resounding backslap, accepting me as one of the anointed.

For the next forty-eight hours, from early morning until very late in the night, he marched me with relentless kindness through the groves, mills, homes, offices, and workshops of Kritsa, and showed me the remarkably oleocentric lives these people lead. I met a few village notables—the mayor, the priest, the knife-maker, and the cobbler who still fashions traditional Cretan boots by hand with goatskins and wooden nails—but otherwise the town was empty, because the other villagers were out harvesting their olives. Everyone in town owns olive trees and makes oil; according to a local proverb, a person is truly poor only when “he doesn’t have a single olive tree to hang himself on.”

One of our first stops was at the modern mill of the Kritsa cooperative, where two big Alfa Laval centrifuges droned like twin jet engines. I watched farmers deliver hemp sacks of olives in trucks, utility vehicles, and on muleback. Each farmer dumped his fruit onto a large scale, collected a slip of paper with its weight, and departed, long before the oil was made—a radical difference from other communal mills I’d visited, where producers watched every stage of the oil-making process intently, and only left with their oil in hand. Zachariádes explained that, at his prompting, all of the 1,000 producers in the cooperative had agreed to make their oil collectively, treating the village lands as one big grove. “We all share the same beliefs about making excellent oil—grow good olives, process them quickly. Using this system, we can finish the day’s deliveries by dinner, and minimize the time that the olives sit around before they’re crushed.” Farmers in neighboring cooperatives, by contrast, make their oil individually, and routinely wait in line at the mill until long past midnight. Kritsa’s common pressing system not only makes better oil, but makes it in quantities that are ten, twenty, even fifty times greater than most Greek cooperatives, allowing them to sell to larger clients like supermarket chains.

Zachariádes instituted this revolutionary system, and made other important changes in the oil-making procedure, after he returned to Kritsa from Athens in 2006 and became president of the village cooperative. Six months later, Kritsa’s oil won a bronze medal at the prestigious Mario Solinas Awards, the yearly contest sponsored by the International Olive Council. In 2008, Kritsa’s oil won the gold medal at the same competition. Soon after, Zachariádes took another bold step by forming an alliance with Gaea, a private producer of high-quality olive oil and other Greek specialty foods, headed by prominent Greek businessman Aris Kefalogiannis. “Our partnership was an unprecedented move for Greek agricultural cooperatives, which are typically very political entities and regard private companies with suspicion,” Kefalogiannis explains. “Here’s yet another way that Nikos Zachariádes showed his innovative business sense, as well as his courage.” Thanks to this partnership, Kritsa is able to sell its oil in the UK, Finland, Lithuania, and other distant places, finding wider and more profitable markets than other Greek cooperatives can on the domestic market, and to send a larger slice of earnings directly to the olive growers. At a time of crisis in the Greek economy, with oil prices at historic lows and many growers abandoning their trees, the farmers of Kritsa are earning 25–30 percent more for their oil than farmers in neighboring villages.

After touring the mill, we ate an impromptu meal on the mill floor, passing around plates of fresh-picked stamnagathi, a wild green something like spinach, and crusts of whole-wheat bread called latherà, over which Zachariádes gushed streams of tart, peppery oil made from local koroneiki olives, using a modified gas pump connected to one of the centrifuges. Nothing can prepare you for the amount of oil that the people of Kritsa eat, or the countless ways that oil and olives enter their daily lives. During my visit I thought often of Ancel Keys, a Minnesota epidemiologist and biochemist who in the 1950s laid the foundations of what is now called the Mediterranean diet, while studying the link between traditional diets and heart disease on Crete, in southern Italy, and elsewhere. Keys and his colleagues were impressed by the quantities of oil consumed on this island: “It was incredible to see an old farmer start the day by knocking back a jigger of olive oil,” his close collaborator Henry Blackburn remembers. Experiences like this forced Keys to consider the potential health benefits of an olive-oil-rich regimen.

Every visit and house call I made during my time in Kritsa followed the same script: shortly after the introductions, my new host would pass around little shot glasses of raki, the potent local aquavit, and begin bringing plate after plate of local specialties cooked with, or swimming in, oil fresh from the village mill. In one corner of every kitchen stood a tall pithari, a terra-cotta urn for oil with a capacity of 100 liters, and a muzuraki sat by the stove, a metal oil can which held about a liter of oil and was usually empty by the end of the meal. We ate raw artichokes, white radishes, lupins, and a dozen other Cretan vegetables I never learned names for, all glossy with oil. There were pita-shaped cheese breads cooked in puddles of oil in a special little frying pan, wild rabbit stewed in oil and rosemary, pastry pockets stuffed with goat cheese and deep-fried in oil, and little fish called barbugna oil-fried and eaten whole, heads and all. For dessert we had macaroons and sesame cookies sprinkled with chopped hazelnuts and honey, whose telltale green color revealed the quantities of olive oil they contained.

Greek Orthodoxy is no less steeped in oil. During a baptism in Kritsa, as elsewhere in Crete, the godfather smears the baby’s entire body with oil, which must according to religious custom be left on the child’s skin for three days after the ceremony before the parents can wash it away. At marriage, couples exchange olive crowns, and a bride’s dowry invariably contains holdings of olive trees. During funerals, after the deceased is lowered into the grave, the priest pours a cross of olive oil over the coffin, intoning, “You will sprinkle me with hyssop and I will be cleaned, you will wash me and I will become whiter than snow.” And at harvest time, many of the faithful bring bottles of their new oil to the church, to be blessed by the priest and used in a range of cures and rituals. As in classical times, olive oil is burned in church lamps, as well as in the lamps that illumine the icons in family homes and the images of the saints in roadside shrines. (During a storm at sea, some of the older villagers drip a few drops of oil from lamps that light the icons of Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors, which they believe will calm the waves.) Olive oil is considered an aphrodisiac; a local proverb, loosely translated, runs, “Eat olive oil to come at night, eat butter to sleep tight.” Following ancient, semisacred rituals, oil is used to avert the evil eye and even to read the future: people eagerly observe the shapes made by the oil floating on the surface of the water in the baptismal font, which reputedly foretell the character—and financial success—of the child.

Oil has always been central to life in these lands. Nikos Zachariádes took me to the ruins of Lato, a pre-Minoan fortress on a hilltop near Kritsa overlooking the Aegean, where we saw magnificent cyclopean stonework and the remains of large oil presses and cisterns. In Dreros, another nearby site dating from the early Iron Age, archaeologists have unearthed an inscription describing a rite of passage performed by all young men of the city, which required them to plant and tend an olive tree and to ensure that it grew healthy and tall. Clay tablets found an hour’s drive west of Kritsa, at Knossos, capital of a Minoan empire built largely on olive oil wealth, describe libations of oil that were offered to a range of deities during regular ceremonies; the frescoes, sculptures, and jewelry unearthed at the Minoan palace there are bushy with olive trees and studded with their fruit. Graves excavated near Kritsa, spanning the 3,000 years from pre-Minoan times to the present, routinely contain olive pits and oil containers among the bones, evidently considered vital provisions for the afterlife. A Roman-era grave found in the nearby town of Hagios Nikolaus, apparently belonging to an athlete, contained an aryballos to hold perfumed oil and a strigil to scrape it away after sports or bathing; a crown of golden olive leaves had been placed on the dead man’s brow, evidently to honor his sporting skill, which over the centuries the damp earth had pressed into the skull, forming a permanent, gleaming veneer on the bone.

Near the end of my stay in Kritsa, we visited a grove in the highlands east of town, where five members of the Zacharia family—a young man and woman in their late twenties, their parents in their fifties, and a grandmother approaching ninety who wore a black headscarf and green wellies—were bringing in their crop of teardrop-shaped koroneiki olives. The parents and their son used hydraulic wands with vibrating fingers to rake down the olives, which they gathered up in tarps and carried to the leafing table, a four-legged platform with a metal screen over it, where the young woman and her grandmother separated the fruit from the leaves and twigs.

As she worked in the late afternoon sunshine, Georgia Zacharia, the young woman, spoke to me in a calm voice. She said that she looks forward to the harvest each year, because it brings her family together. “And in the evenings I have no time or energy to think about my problems and my worries. I’m too exhausted.” She said that the olive harvest is a great comfort to her during the economic crisis that Greece is currently suffering. “Everyone has olive trees, a garden. Being self-sufficient is not that far away for us. Things are going to be all right.”


AT DAWN one morning in April 2010, workers from the agricultural cooperative Terre di Puglia, walking into an olive grove they were to prune that day in Mesagne, near Brindisi, discovered a pipe bomb at the foot of a tree. This wasn’t the first warning. Several months before, someone had broken into one of their cars and scrawled a death threat on the dashboard. Scraps of paper had appeared in their mailboxes from time to time, bearing thinly veiled threats: “Whoever goes to work today will pay the price for everybody.” “Silence!” “Stop breaking our balls!” Arsonists had slipped into their lands by night and set groves, vineyards, and farm equipment alight.

A bomb was a new level of intimidation. “Of course, it wasn’t meant to kill anybody,” Alessandro Leo, president of Terre di Puglia, told me. “Like all the other messages we’ve received since we started cultivating these lands, it was put there to intimidate, to destabilize our cooperative.”

Leo looked hard at me for a moment, as if trying to see whether I believed him—or to decide what he himself believed about the incident. Then he laughed, high-pitched and merrily, and shook his head. “At least, that’s what I tell myself. After all, we know who these people are, what they’ve done in the past. We know they’re capable of anything.”

Leo and his colleagues at Terre di Puglia are cultivating lands that until recently belonged to the Sacra Corona Unita, the pugliese mafia. Their former owner, Cosimo Antonio Screti, known as Don Tonino, was a powerful member of the organization and greatly feared in the area. After Screti was convicted of crimes including drug trafficking and membership in a criminal organization, the Italian government confiscated much of his real estate holdings, including this grove, which investigators believe Screti bought with the proceeds of illegal activity, particularly the drug trade. In January 2008, the grove and several other vineyards and farmlands were given in usufruct to Terre di Puglia, a member of a nonprofit organization called Libera Terra (“Liberated Land”) which fights mafia infiltration throughout Italy and cultivates farmlands taken from the mob. The workers in the cooperative are socially disadvantaged, and include several recovering drug addicts; these former victims of the narcotics trade work to regain their dignity and autonomy through hard labor on this land, which was once bought with drug money by a noted mobster.

Trouble was, the mobster hadn’t left. After being released from prison for reasons of poor health, Don Tonino returned to his villa in the middle of the fields then being farmed by the cooperative. Neither he nor his former associates in the Sacra Corona Unita were pleased to see someone else harvesting olives and making oil on property they still considered to be theirs. “He walked around like he was still the boss here,” Leo remembers, “with the patronizing attitude and the arrogance that are typical of this kind of character.”

The year Terre di Puglia took over management of the lands, no farmers or laborers dared to work for them, despite chronic unemployment in the area. “People avoided us,” Leo remembers. Not owning a tractor, he and his coworkers had to call the Italian forest service to plough their lands before they could sow the first wheat crop.

Nevertheless, the inaugural harvest was a modest success. Using a rare local species of wheat which they’d tracked down among elderly farmers in the area, they baked traditional pugliese crispbreads called tarallini and friselle. They grew local fiaschetto tomatoes, from which they made pasta sauces and sun-dried tomatoes. They pruned and tended the long-abandoned vines of the negroamaro grape varietal, which yielded an excellent red wine. And from their small grove of centuries-old olive trees, they made a few hundred bottles of oil.

As word of their work spread, local and national organizations lent a hand. Agronomists and enologists from Slow Food, the culinary and fair-trade NGO, began to advise them, and a few supermarkets, like COOP, a national chain, started selling their products. Libera Terra signed a collaborative agreement with a prominent institute of agronomy in nearby Ostuni, and with several local olive-growers and oil-makers. Finally, one by one, local farmhands began coming to work at the cooperative. “I never dreamed I’d set foot on Don Tonino’s lands one day,” one of them told Alessandro Leo. “Or see this soil, which was overgrown with brambles for so long, turn fertile again.”

For Leo, the first taste of the olio nuovo produced powerful emotions. “I thought about the unique story of injustice and justice it contained. I thought about the people who used to taste this oil, and about the people who can taste it now.”

Leo says the oil is emblematic of the kind of food Libera Terra grows. “Each of our products has a story to tell. We want to recover a sense of food as having not just material and commercial value, but a cultural value too. We do this by emphasizing the link between a particular food and the territorio, the landscape where it’s grown and always has been. These ancient olive trees, in particular, are symbols of this territorio. They’re a central part of this landscape, and have sustained its inhabitants for countless centuries. When you eat this oil, you’re not just eating something made from an anonymous tree in some industrial grove. You’re eating a food from one specific spot on the planet, with a unique history.”

Leo and his colleages at the cooperative are using only approved, natural chemicals on their trees and, starting next year, their oil will be certified as biologico, or organic. “We’re freeing the land from systematic poisoning by pesticides and other toxic agricultural products, which concentrate particularly in olive oil. Here’s another kind of organized crime, another mafia that we all need to stand up to and speak out against. Or else they’ll kill us just as sure as a hit man would.”

By Tom Mueller in "Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil", W.W. Norton, New York, 2012, excerps p. 73-95. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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