In the summer of 1967, archaeologist Peter Warren began excavating a hilltop settlement on Crete's southern coast called Myrtos Fournou Korifi. What he uncovered would rewrite our understanding of olive oil's origins. Among the ruins of a community that thrived between 2600 and 2300 BC, Warren found something remarkable: clay vats fitted with channelled spouts, surrounded by carbonised olive pits. These were not storage vessels. They were purpose-built devices for separating oil from water — the oldest known olive oil production equipment ever discovered. Four thousand years before the International Olive Council published its grading standards, the Minoans were already making extra virgin olive oil. They just didn't call it that. Before the Minoans: Older Roots Than We Thought The Myrtos finds pushed the timeline of organised oil production back dramatically, but the story of olives on Crete begins even earlier. Paleobotanical evidence — pollen cores extracted from lake sediments and carbonised wood fragments found at settlement sites across the island — indicates that olive cultivation on Crete stretches back to approximately 3600 BC. That places the deliberate growing of olive trees in the early Bronze Age, a full millennium before Warren's oil-separation vats. This distinction matters. Wild olives had grown across the Mediterranean for millennia, but cultivation — the deliberate selection, planting, and tending of trees for their fruit — represents a fundamentally differe...
Unfiltered Cold-Pressed Olive Oil from Crete
Natural Koroneiki olive oil from our family grove in Crete
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