The olive is life

There is something beyond the Mediterranean Sea that bounds the countries sharing its shores: The olive. The olive tree is mentioned from the Torah to the Bible and eventually in the Quran. In the Quran it is mentioned as the "?ecere-i Tayyibe," a beneficial fruitful tree, or functional if it can be described as such.

Olive oil is not only essential to Mediterranean cuisines but it is also a symbol of life, a source of life that creates a culture around its existence. Mediterranean kids are born to its taste, and the rest of their lives are evolved around it; olive oil is like an invisible umbilical cord that binds them together beyond ethnicity and religion. With the start of the olive harvest season, this reality was once again demonstrated in the Aegean town of Ayval?k last week, the foremost olive growing region in Turkey. 

The Ayval?k International Olive Harvest Festival is an organization in its 11th year initiated by the Ayval?k Chamber of Commerce. This year the harvest days were celebrated from Nov. 6-8. This year's title was, "If there are olives, there is life! For millennia," emphasizing the crucial role of the olive tree in Aegean life throughout the ages. The organization has gone international in recent years with the collaboration of the International Olive Council (IOC), the Network of Mediterranean Olive Oil Towns (Re.C.O.Med. / Rete delle Città dell'Olio) and QvExtra, a Spanish-based international association for quality control. Among the guests was also the mayor of Kyrenia, Cyprus, joining the harvest festival for the first time, along with participants from Greece and France. Leaving aside conflicts and rivalry in the olive oil business, the participants shared mutual interests in expanding the culture of olive oil culture to...