Winter Fruit on Crete

It goes without saying that in Northern Europe, during winter, opportunities for harvesting fruit are pretty limited. But as many of you will know, here on Crete, winter is one of the busiest times of year in the agricultural calendar. Once the last charter plane has left the island and we have had the first proper rainfall then the olive season begins, followed by the orange harvest. The winter season is now drawing to a close (eek!). So with this in mind we thought it might be a nice idea if we turned the spotlight on some of our favourite fruit.

Olives: Myths and Pithy Tales

Olives have been grown on Crete for thousands of years and are the basis of many myths. According to legend, Goddess Athena became patron of Athens as a result of winning a contest against Poseidon to give the city the most useful gift. Poseidon struck his trident into a rock and produced a horse, whereas Athena produced an olive tree. In Minoan Crete olive oil was an extremely important commodity, and the olive is a popular subject in Minoan pottery and art. At the Ancient Olympic games winners were crowned with olive leaves and prizes included amphoras of oil.

In modern times, olive oil has remained an important source of revenue for the island. The presence of olive oil in the Cretan diet has been cited as accounting for lower rates of cardiovascular disorders among Cretans than among people from Northern Europe and the US; the famous ‘Seven Countries Study’ conducted by Ancel Keys in the 1960’s is often cited as evidence. However, the jury is still out on this one, higher fish and green vegetable consumption are also potential factors. Olives are inedible before being cured—a common way to do this is to soak the olives in brine for a couple of weeks. Like many curiosities in life, this makes you wonder how anyone found this out in the first place. It may interest you to know that there aren’t that many jokes about olives on the internet (and those that there are really aren’t very good).

What Colour is an Orange

The origin of the orange is not as easy to trace as the origin of the olive (try saying this after a couple of rakis). For a start, despite the different varieties of the fruit that you may find across the Mediterranean the olive has managed to retain fundamental aspects of its evolutionary heritage and integrity. An olive is an olive in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, the average modern orange is almost certainly a hybrid resulting from flighty cross-breeding between vague citrons and may well be an imposter posing as a mandarin.

Oranges arrived in Europe from South East Asia. Persian oranges, grown in the Mediterranean from the 11th Century were bitter. Sweet oranges were brought to Europe from China or India in the 15th Century by the Portuguese. Modern Greek has two words for orange: — πορτοκάλι (portokali ‘from Portugal’) for the sweet orange and νεράντζι (nernatzi, derived from the Persian ‘narang’) for the bitter orange.

The colour orange has been cited as a standalone basic colour term (like red or blue) by some researchers interested in the categorization of colour. However, this is debatable as in many languages the name of the colour term and the fruit are the same. Furthermore, in many languages the word for the fruit precedes the word for the colour. In English the word for the fruit appeared in the language in the 14th century, whereas the first reported use of ‘orange’ as a colour term was in 1512, at the court of Henry VIII. In Old English the colour was referred to as geoluhread which translates as yellow-red.

Oranges make several appearances in popular culture. In 1972, Outspan produced three motorized oranges made from parts of a mini as a way of promoting their fruit. In the Godfather movies, the presence of oranges on the screen indicates that something nasty is about to happen to someone. Tintin and the Blue Oranges is a 1964 French film which is based on Paul Eluard’s surreal comment “Earth is blue like an orange”. The movie Clockwork Orange which was notorious for inspiring the debate around copycat violence was withdrawn from British cinemas by the film’ s director Stanley Kubrick in 1973. There are more jokes about oranges than olives on the internet, but they are not very good either!