Manolis’s olive grove in Προδρόμι / Prodromi

Today we took a trip up into the hills behind Paleochora to visit the olive groves belonging to Manolis Klironomakis.

Manolis is from Paleochora and he has a clothes shop further up the road from where we are living (featuring the biggest collection of Banksy t-shirts we’ve ever seen!). We got chatting to Manolis one afternoon, when Saul was buying a pair of shorts, and we asked him about the bottles of olive oil at his desk, was it local organic oil? And it turned out that not only was it local organic oil, but that it was from his own olive trees.

Manolis explained to us that his method of harvesting olives differs to that which is the tradition in this region. Here, the traditional way has always been to lay down black nets under the trees and wait for the olives to ripen and fall. This is in part because the variety of olive trees here is particularly tall and therefore quite difficult to harvest manually. This method is therefore also less labour-intensive. There are both pluses and minuses to this method: firstly, the positive is that there can be a high yield of olives, and they are large and juicy by the time they fall off the tree. On the one hand, this gives a decent quantity of oil, maybe 1L of oil from 3kg of olives harvested. The downside, however, is that the pH of the olives is higher by this point of ripeness, ie, they are quite sweet. The natural acidity has gone and, as a result, also the antioxidants which are so beneficial to us. In addition, if you wait for the majority of olives to fall to the nets below before gathering the entirety of the crop, by necessity, some of the olives will have been resting there on the ground for a week or two or more, and will be past their best.

The method used by Manolis to harvest his olives is this: some time before the olives reach full ripeness, around November, Manolis and a team of workers harvest the olives by placing nets below three trees at a time, and handpicking the olives from the branches, using a special type of whisk which agitates the branches on a small scale. (Another method is to use a larger machine to grasp onto the trunk and shake the entire tree, but this is over-vigorous and can damage the tree.) The method Manolis employs ensures that all the olives are collected before they hit the ground. He also ensures that the olives are transported to the cold-press the same day. By the time evening comes, the olives have been harvested, bagged up in sacks, washed, crushed into a paste and then slow cold-pressed, to extract the oil. The yield using this method is less than half of the other method, giving around 1L of oil for every 7kg of olives. But, oh, if you could smell the oil! Manolis kindly gave us a bottle of his oil to sample and it is the most delicious oil we have ever tasted, with aromas of freshly cut grass and countryside.

His groves have two varieties of olive trees, those planted 150 years ago, Tsounati olive trees which give small, light brown olives; and Koroneiki olive trees, smaller trees more commonly seen in northern Crete and on the Peloponnese, which give small, green olives. Both varieties provide excellent olive oil but are not typically served for eating.

Harvesting looks like this:

Cold-pressing is a method of oil extraction which does not involve the use of heat or chemicals. The olives are first pressed into a paste and then a mechanical press is used to separate the oil from the pulp. We learned lots about this process and its development when we visited the Museum of the Olive in Sparta back in October. You can read more about that here: LINK

The factory where Manolis’s olives are pressed is on the outskirts of Paleochora. It is certified for organic production of olive oil, so this means that the oil produced by Manolis is fully organic, from tree to table. He also told us that he prepares Kalamata olives from the tree in his back garden for eating and for sale. To do this, he slices each olive oil down the sides and leaves to soak in a jar of water, and 4% seasalt, which he harvests himself at the shore during the summertime.

So, as to our trip up into the hills to see the olive groves, well, what a spectacular trip it was. First, we drove in the van as far as the village of Άνυδροι / Anidri, around 5km inland from here. Manolis had suggested we park our van here and travel in his pickup truck up to the groves and, upon seeing the windy, single-vehicle road, liberally coated with rocks and accompanied by a sheer drop all the way, we were super glad of his suggestion! There was no way our van would have made it, and reversing back down would have been a nightmare! So we all hopped into the pickup (masks on, windows open), with his gorgeous German Shepherd, Alia, sitting out back, and wove our way up the hills to the next village of Προδρόμι / Prodromi which is about another 5km inland and sits at 500m above sea level. The views from up here are stunning – looking out from this hillside over a gorge towards the next hill, surrounded by olive trees, wild thyme, chamomile, oregano and Cretan ebony, a plant which is causing quite the headache for Manolis. If not kept under control, this plant grows into a substantial woody bush which then competes with the olive trees for water, a scarce resource on the hills of the south coast of Crete. As an organic farmer, Manolis does not use pesticides, nor does he allow the Cretan goats to graze as they would eat from the olive trees, so Manolis has employed a man to strim the Cretan ebony in the hope of limiting their spread.

We asked Manolis about how he ensures that his trees have enough water throughout the year, and if he drives tanks of water up to the groves, as we have seen many pickup trucks with large water tanks in the rear, serving this purpose. His answer was enlightening. He does not have an irrigation system on his land and, at 500m elevation, the land benefits from higher rainfall and lower temperatures than sea level (about 3C lower on average). Decent snowfalls during the winter ensure that the springs in these hills are plentiful during the springtime. So far so good. Manolis says that, during the height of the summer, he walks regularly around his groves and waits until a tree tells him that it needs water! He knows this if the leaves show signs of curling. He says that this happens to maybe 50 trees a year, out of his total of 700 trees and, when this occurs, he gets water to these trees as a matter of urgency. He has two 20-tonne containers that store water from him, collected from rainwater over the winter.

As for fertilizing the ground of the groves, he explained to us that, a couple of years ago, he had horses belonging to a friend grazing and wandering freely among the trees, but the well-scattered horse manure ensured a wide spreading of Cretan ebony seeds and now it’s far more extensive across his land! Headache!

This land has been in his family for generations and some of the trees were planted by his great-grandfather. He began working on expanding the olive venture 15 years ago or so, planting 600 of the newer variety of olive tree. He has been selling his olive oil to buyers in England and Germany for years now, although Brexit isn’t helping.

Manolis has a fence running around the perimeter of his land. If he did not have this, goats would wander his land and eat everything in sight, including the olive trees. Hence the fencing! He pointed out areas on the opposite hills where the goats have stripped the land. The difference was stark. You can see here some areas with bare ground and only trees visible:

Manolis also pointed out to us, on the hilltop opposite, the outline of a fortification around the top of the hill. On that hilltop, in the 4th century BCE, lived a city of 10,000 people. That’s quite incredible to imagine now, as it just looks like a rather barren hilltop. However, people were able to live in this area due to the ample supply of fresh mineral water and, indeed, there were seven such cities atop the hills surrounding Paleochora at that time, towards the end of the Bronze Age. All these peoples, as well as people from all across Crete, frequented another city situated close to the sea in this area, called Λίσσος / Lissos. Lissos was regarded as a centre of healing due to its pure waters. Manolis pointed out that they can’t have been all that successful, as a large number of graves can be spotted on the entrance to the ancient city! Lissos was a harbour city and contains the ruins of a Temple of Asklepios, the statues from which are now kept at the Archaeological Museum at Chania. These statues were only discovered in 1957, by a shepherd who was looking for water for his sheep! These hilltop cities minted their own currency. The coins of the hilltop in front of Manolis’s grove had a dolphin on one side and a bee on the other. The Lissos coins also featured a dolphin, but had the head of the goddess Artemis on the reverse.

It’s not much of a life for a dog, but this is the traditional method of restricting goats from roaming through villages in rural Greece.

We were most surprised to see huge piles of tomatoes at the side of the mountain roads between Anidri and Prodromi, at a couple of spots, and we would never have guessed as to why they were there, but for Manolis explaining it to us. In an average year, a tomato grower here could sell his crop for around 40c per kilo. This year, however, the price has dropped to around 5c/kg. That’s astonishing, given that we would pay around €1.40/kg in the shops here. The price has plummeted due to reduced demand worldwide for tomatoes, no restaurants needing supply, restrictions on exports, etc., and also the numerous middlemen increasing their cut of the profit. The situation is so catastrophic this year that it is not even worth the growers’ while paying people to pick the crop. So, instead, they are welcoming goat and sheep herders to come into their tunnels to help themselves to huge quantities of ripe tomatoes, which they then transport to the mountainsides and tip them out for the goats and sheep to eat. It is a calamitous turn of events for the Cretan tomato grower.

Our trip to the olive groves was a joy … and we hope that we may have some of Manolis’s amazing olive oil to sell at home later in the year, as he prefers to deal as directly with customers as possible. Watch this space for news on that front 😊

Here’s his website for more info on how Manolis grows, harvests and prepares his olives and herbs for sale:

Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil from Greece (manolisoliveoil.com)

Manolis also rents out self-catering rooms in the house where he grew up, in Paleochora, for anyone who is looking for a spot to stay:

Anonymous Homestay – Paleochora Chania Crete

As to the trip back down from the grove, once Manolis had dropped us back to the van in Anidri, we wove back down through the widening roads (see below for the ‘wider’ road!) and before long were back at sea level and ready for a rest and a swim.