olive oil collection

Did you know?...

The olive cultivation is considered to be quite easy. The olive tree does not demand special care and the most difficult process is the collection of the olives. The tree is very resiliant and it multiplies itself easily. The hardest thing for its cultivation is the cutting of the branches. In this way the offspring are renewed and the production augments.

In Creta the elderly people did not cut the branches annually. Year to year though they noticed that the trees that had broken branches due to snowfall had greater production that the others. From that time and afterwards they started to cut the branches every year.

Peloponnese Oil
Peloponnese and especially the south-west areas, comprise for centuries one of the most important olive grove of Mediterranean. The great olive warehouses of Pylos with decades of earthenware jars and signs written in Linear B, murals with the olive trees printed on them and the important findings in Mycenae comprise valuable evidence for the olive cultivation and the exploitation of its products. Peloponnesians never gave up the olive production. In byzantine years Peloponnese was considered to be the most important area for olive cultivation of the autocracy.
Even in years of war, people continued their production as it was very important for their survival and economic evolvement. The olive cultivation supplied the soap production and oil production of the area continuously. Even areas totally thin and without water like Mani, counted on olive cultivation for centuries.
After 1860 Peloponnese produced the 66.5% of the olive oil of all Greece. Even today the oil and olive production of the area offers economic robustness to the people. All five counties and especially the southern part of Peloponnese produce great quantities of olive oil of great quality!