The gold of the gods

As far as the eye can see, the silvery green leaves of the olive trees of the Kolymvari region vibrate. In the evening, local farmers gather in the traditional Cretan coffee shop to talk and eat bread with olive oil.“Siga, siga,” they say: “take it easy.” This is how the people of Crete manage to live to a ripe old age: the oil is good for their health. Most notably, it protects against cardiovascular disease.

It’s a hot morning; there’s not much movement to be seen apart from the shimmering air above the olive trees. But the mood at the kafenion, a traditional coffee shop, is tumultuous: “The Italians come here with their tanker ships and buy our olive oil to enhance their own oil and then they export it as Italian oil,” Eftixis Tsilimigakis says annoyed. But the 41-year-old doesn’t raise his voice. Thoughtfully, he picks up his glass of raki, a Cretan schnapps, and sips at it. Today, as every day, he meets with other olive farmers from Spilia at the kafenion in the late morning.

This is a well earned break for the farmers. They drive out to their olive plantations before sunrise, where they “cut out all the branches growing on the inside of the tree or downward, as good olives only thrive in the sun,” as Eftixis explains. Then for his visit to the kafenion, he dons a blue shirt, which he leaves unbuttoned down to the top of his pot belly, his chest covered in the same dark, curly hairs as his head. The conversation mostly revolves around his favorite subject: olives.

Olive leaves to crown champions
There are 35 million olive trees on Crete. The Kolymvari region in the west of the island is home to what is believed to be the world’s oldest olive tree. It is 5,000 years old. When its first shoots emerged from the ground, Crete was already home to Europe’s first advanced civilization, that of the legendary King Minos. The Minoan palace at Knossos housed 80,000 liters of olive oil stored in jars as tall as a man. The systematic cultivation of wild olive trees began around 2,000 BC. The ancient Greeks rubbed the oil into their bodies and fashioned victors’ wreaths out of the twigs to crown their champions. Incidentally, the winners of the marathon at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens were awarded an olive wreath—from that same 5,000-year-old tree on Crete.

But most of all, olive oil has always been used in cooking. The Germans manage with a single liter bottle of olive oil a year, while the Italians and Spanish use ten liters on salads and in their pots and pans—but the Cretans consume 35 liters a year. Yet even this level of consumption is by far surpassed by Joanna Katsanebaki Patelaki. Joanna is a chef working in a 600-bed hotel. She uses 400 liters of olive oil a year—not at the hotel, but at home. In her five-person household, this amounts to 80 liters per person. That much of sunflower oil or lard would soon see a person six feet under, but the simple, unsaturated fatty acids in olive oil reduce cholesterol levels and protect the arteries from becoming clogged.

Consuming copious quantities of olive oil helps prevent heart disease. The American researcher Ancel Keys was the first to study this scientifically. He noticed back in the 1950s that a large proportion of people on Crete lived to a ripe old age. In conjunction with medical professionals from other countries, he investigated how the foods people eat affect their life expectancy and came to the conclusion that there is no healthier combination of foods than the daily fare of the inhabitants of Mediterranean nations, and Crete in particular.

“My favorite food is vegetables,” enthuses Joanna the chef. You can prepare vegetables in so many different ways, she says: fried, baked, or grilled, and of course she’d never use anything else but the “gold of the Gods.” With it, Joanna likes a slice of dark Cretan bread—also, you guessed it, baked in olive oil. She likes fish, too, but meat is rarely served in her house. Joanna’s traditional diet consists of exactly what the medical establishment says people should eat in this day and age. Joanna comes from a village in the White Mountains; one of her neighbors there is 107 years old. Another woman is 93 and lives on her own. Joanna’s father is 86 and, she says, “he’s never been to the doctor, his diet consists of wine, bread, garlic and olive oil.” Joanna’s oil from the village of her birth is emerald green with a taste reminiscent of the smell of freshly cut grass. “The taste of the oil shouldn’t be scratchy on the palate or throat,” says Joanna.

When Joanna, now in her late thirties, was a child, her family didn’t have a refrigerator; everything was conserved with olive oil, even cheese was marinated in oil—and orange juice was kept fresh with a layer of olive oil on top. If her own children came down with a fever, she’d prepare an infusion of chamomile and olive oil and rub them down with it. She drizzled olive oil on wounds, too, and believes that “slowly drinking a teaspoon of it every morning” wards off a cold. Joanna’s homemade remedies gained a new scientific basis in 2005 when American researchers discovered oleocanthal in olive oil, a substance that has antiinflammatory and pain-killing properties similar to the drug Ibuprofen.

The olives are processed quickly
As far as the eye can see, the silvery green leaves of the olive trees vibrate in the hills around Spilia. Only in the more recent plantations, those planted within the last fifty years, are the trees aligned in regular rows like chocolates in a box. Eftixis harvests them the old-fashioned way: by hitting the trees with a stick and collecting the olives that fall. The only difference these days is that Eftixis hangs nets under the trees so that the olives do not fall on the ground but into the nets. And, he stresses, “we take them to the mill that same evening.” It is above all the speed of the processing that makes the Cretan olive oil a top-quality product and ensures that the acid content is low.

In the olden days, there weren’t many mills on Crete, so the olives were gathered and sent off once a week. The fruit spoiled and went moldy in the plastic sacks.“Here on Crete we don’t do that anymore!” Eftixis assures us —olives like that would fail the experts’ quality test— performed with their eyes and noses. People from Terra Creta, a firm that bottles Cretan olive oil for the international market, are always going back and forth to the mills to examine the freshly pressed olive oil. The aroma and taste tests come after the lab tests conducted by the young food chemist Fotis Sousalis. Olive oil production appears to be easy at first glance: you plant a tree, wait twenty years, shake the olives off the branches, press out the oil and bottle it—how could that be difficult? “Pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, plastic sacks, lengthy storage periods, plastic tubes for bottling,” all of these are areas where people can get it wrong, explains Fotis. Not to mention fraudulent activities such as unauthorized heat treatment and blending. It is hardly surprising that an oil treated like that loses all of its health-giving attributes.

“Our ancestors used a lot of chemicals,” says Eftixis. “These days, we simply turn over the grass beneath the trees and fight the olive fly with a small range of insecticides or with traps if the farm is organic.” Consumers appreciate the effort. Terra Creta’s best-selling oil is its Kolymvari brand, even though oil covered by the protected designation of origin is more expensive. It therefore pays off to bottle the good Cretan oil locally rather than “selling it to the Italians,” as Eftixis puts it.

This is what they talk about when they sit down together in the heat of the day at the kafenion, where they snack on cucumbers, tomatoes and dry bread and drink their raki schnapps. Raki is enjoyed in much smaller quantities than olive oil. The farmers don’t tip their glasses, they just sip at them. “Siga, siga,” as they say: “take it easy.”

(Text: Barbara Schaefer, Photos: Lukas Coch)
For Lukas Coch, 25, Crete made a welcome change to his hectic everyday life. He usually spends his time photographing soccer matches in Germany’s First Division, the Bundesliga. Travel journalist Barbara Schaefer, 45, writes for the FAZ, among other publications. She couldn’t get enough of the Cretan olive oil, resulting in some excess baggage at check-in at Heraklion airport.