Olive Oil Culture History II - From the Roman Empire to the Present
24-03-2023
17:56
Temple of Hercules Olivarius; Piazza Bocca della Verità, Forum Boarium, Rome. According to the book "The Saturlania" of the Roman writer Macrobius (IV century AD); B.C. II. It was built by the wealthy Roman olive trader Marcus Octavius Herennius in the 16th century, on the banks of the Tiber river, by the Cypriot Hermodorus, one of the architects of the period. On a sea voyage, the merchant who managed to get rid of the pirates had the temple built to express his gratitude to the god Hercules (Hercules the Olive Branch Bearear / Hercules with the Knotted Olive Stick or Hercules of the Olive Merchants / Hercules of the Olive Oil Merchants) whom he prayed to get rid of. It is a structure surrounded by Tuscon columns in a circular style.
The Romans are considered as a civilization specialized in olive cultivation, olive oil production, distribution and storage of olives in human history. Roman civilization is one of the milestones in history in obtaining high oil from olives. They largely inherited and developed the olive and olive oil culture of classical Greek civilization. B.C. The Romans, who started exporting olives from the 1st century, became an empire in the next 200 years. The successful rule of Filius Augustus, considered the greatest emperor in Roman history, ushered in a period of relative peace known as the "Pax Romana" or "Pax Augusta". When the peace environment provided by the Romans in the Mediterranean is added to the increasing olive and olive oil production, the olive oil trade begins to increase rapidly. For the food supply of the capital Rome, whose population has reached half a million, a continuous transport of olive oil is carried out from different parts of the empire. As a result of this trade, so many olive oil amphorae came to Rome that an amphora remnant hill called "Mt. Testacio"/Ancient age garbage dump emerged from the amphorae discarded after being used on the banks of the Tiber river.
It was the first civilization to reveal the oil extraction method as a written document for the first time, and to apply methods suitable for these criteria (use of right-angled millstone, worm screw wood press vise). Cato the elder or wise (234-149 BC); He developed the printing application with lever and roller system and brought it to life in Andalusia, and developed tools for olive cultivation. A Roman statesman and jurist, Cato's book “On Agriculture” has survived to the present day. He wrote for the olive and olive oil sector the works titled “Agreement with Workers Collecting Olives for Farm Owners”, “Agreement of Farm Owners with Oil Shop Owners” and “Olive Execution Agreement”.
the successor of Cato the Wise, Columella (4-70 AD); Known as the botanist of the Roman civilization, he described about twenty olive species and created a documentation on the quality criteria of olive oil for the first time in history. It classifies both table olives and olive oil according to their quality. Olie Filos (flower of the oil), which is described as pure obtained in the first squeeze, is the most valuable oil, the oil obtained from the second squeeze is cheaper than Oleum Sequens. The oil obtained from the olives that have fallen to the bottom of the tree – not from the branch but from the soil – is called cadacum. Oil “cibarium” made from diseased olives was used to burn in oil lamps. An internationally accepted classification like this could only be made two thousand years later.
The reason why the Romans made olive oil an important commercial product in all of the Mediterranean basin geographies is the peace they provided in the Mediterranean and their policies encouraging olive agriculture. Olive oil filled in amphorae is brought to the consumer by sea. Each of the amphorae loaded with olive oil usually had the name of the producer, the region of the olive oil, the name of the merchant, and a seal indicating that the tax was paid. The empty weight of the amphora from which the oil was exported was also indicated on it. With the general peace that started in this period, settlements started in the plains and social, cultural and commercial life was revived. With the establishment of Roman colonies, new roads were built. M.S. By the 2nd century, there is evidence that olive oil from Spain was exported to Alexandria and Israel, as well as to Germany and possibly England. It was the Roman traders who first established the Mediterranean olive oil market – in the sense of determining the price that prevailed in the market – so much so that in BC. In 120 B.C. (Late Republic Period), olive oil merchants who got rich built a temple and statue named “Hercules Olivarius” on the banks of the Tiber river in Rome. This temple, which has a tholos plan (conical or vaulted -dome-like-roofed, circular structure) and surrounded by columns, is the oldest temple in Rome that has survived to the present day, mostly made of marble.
The fuel of the oil lamps used for lighting purposes by the Romans is olive oil, they took the place of the torch in the Mediterranean basin due to the abundant production of olives. Oil lamps were an indication of the qualities of their users, with their construction technique, material, figures and inscriptions drawn on them. The distinction between the rich and the poor could be made by means of oil lamps. It is seen that oil lamp masters produced different and interesting oil lamp works according to the socio-economic and cultural structure of the society. The figures on the terracotta oil lamps with erotic scenes used in Rome, which values pleasure and eroticism, give an idea about the lives of the Roman upper classes of that period.
Olive oil is mentioned in the oldest known cookbook, written by the Roman noble Apicus in the 1st century BC. According to Plinius, the son of a wealthy Roman family, writer and bookworm, there are two types of liquids that are good for the human body; “internally wine, externally olive oil; but olive oil has a different place”. According to the Romans, those who use animal fat instead of olive oil in their meals are barbarians.
Greek, later through Roman merchants, BC. Like the Sicilian and Etruscan peoples of 600-400 BC, those living in the Provanca region of Spain and France began to discover the benefits of olive oil and plant imported olive saplings. M.S. By the middle of the 2nd century, the Spanish region known as "Baetica" or "Andalusia" reached a capacity to export to Alexandria, England and Germany in olive and olive oil production.
Among the civilizations that have dominated Anatolia since ancient times, the Romans were the most aware of the natural wealth of the region known as "Plain Cilicia", today known as Çukurova, and traded the agricultural resources in the region. As far as it can be understood from the Hittite texts, BC. Olive cultivation has been carried out in the Cilician Plain since 2000-1200s, however; M.S. During the Roman period of 400 BC, many agricultural products, especially wine and olive oil, were exported to the capital city of Rome.
In the Palestine region of the first centuries AD, the kings and priests holding olive-wood staffs in their hands, as if they were the demigod Heracles of ancient Greece or the Jewish king David, who in the scriptures "boiled when the oil was put on his head" in the scriptures, they were crawling from olive oil, which was believed to be sacred, and differed from ordinary people. . Olive oil was used in the blessing rites of persons and objects in Anatolia and the Near East, in Palestine Jews and in the early periods of Christianity. Olive oil, which was used as an object of consecration in death rites in ancient Greek and Egyptian cultures in previous centuries, started to be used as a healing tool in time, besides this function. Its use as an object of consecration continues through the ages. In ancient Rome there was only the custom of anointing kings and emperors with oil and washing the burial with oil. Kings, priests, sacrificial stones, ritual objects, holy and unholy buildings, the sick, the couple, the newborn and the dead were blessed with olive oil. Even today, although not very common, in some Christian communities in the Middle East, newborns are baptized with olive oil.
Its use for lighting purposes has continued throughout the ages, and the tradition of hanging oil lamps decorated with gold and silver with chains becomes widespread in Christian communities that have power and wealth over time. The lamp oils used for lighting in churches were olive oil, these oils were called “Prayer oil” and “Holy oil”. It was kept in small bottles called “ampullae” made of silver, lead or earth. Such bottles can still be found in the treasury sections of old churches. Oil lamps were used to illuminate the houses of the noble and the wealthy, the palaces of the rulers, the temples of the peoples, instead of today's electric lamps, throughout the Mediterranean Region and for more than 5000 years.
M.S. In the 4th and 5th centuries, the Germanic tribes, who descended from Northern and Eastern Europe to the south and ended the domination of the Roman Empire, also affected the food habits of southern Europe, replacing the Greek-Roman culture trio of bread, wine and olive oil, meat, beer and animal fat. gets.
We have no data or evidence of olive oil production technology in the Middle Ages; The innovations of the last two centuries, for which we have a lot of data, lead us to the conclusion that there was no remarkable progress in the way of olive oil production during the middle ages. Another claim related to this opinion is that olive oil was not given as much importance in the Middle Ages as it was in Antiquity. German saint Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1178), who is also known as the first female European physician to write a book on healthy nutrition and healthy life, as a northern European religious person, does not like the taste of olive oil, and recommends olive oil as medicine, not food. At that time, olive was not cultivated in Northern Europe, lesser-known olive oil could not replace animal fat as food in kitchens, probably the quality of olive oil sent to the north was also bad. During the Middle Ages, with the influence of Christianity, the use of olive oil decreased even in Italy, and animal fats began to be used more frequently in the kitchens.
In terms of religious orders and symbolic meanings, the peoples of the Christian faith generally used olive oil only in rituals, while the peoples of the Jewish faith used it in their kitchens. Presumably, Christians, especially those belonging to the lower classes, preferred to use animal fats in their kitchens. This habit is thought to have remained unchanged throughout the Middle Ages. XV. In 19th century Spain, there are records that the Holy Inquisition interpreted the consumption of olive oil in the homes of families who had left Judaism and converted to Catholicism as evidence of secret Jewish faith.
Until the use of gas lamps, olive oil was used for lighting in oilpots made of different materials ranging from soil to gold. The museums contain numerous exquisitely inlaid glass oil lamps, first manufactured in medieval Syria, but soon successfully imitated in workshops on the Venetian island of Murano. It is known that Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, who was killed in 1579, ordered nine hundred lamps for mosques in Venice, and even sent model drawings so that the manufacturers could understand what kind of lamp he designed.
Olive oil was also used to illuminate the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca. With this; For those centuries, the use of olive oil for lighting was actually an expensive and luxurious option, the extent to which it was used in everyday life by ordinary people is unknown.
During the Renaissance, especially in Italy, olive oil gained value again; there is an explosion in its consumption in kitchens, cookbooks and in general in every field. This process, which is described as the rebirth of the food culture, which is defined as the Mediterranean Cuisine today, in Italy at that time has continued until today. Leonardo da Vinci's M.S. There is an olive oil press that he designed in 1550.
In the late 1600s, another sector in which olive oil was used began to rise; soap making. In the 16th century, Tunisia took the leading role in soap production, at the beginning of 1700 Marseille became the capital of soap, then the island of Crete, which led the production of olive oil in the years when the Ancient Greek Civilization was on the rise. Soap production on the island of Crete was established in the XVIII. increased significantly over the course of the century. The number of soap factories, which was six in 1723, had reached twelve in the mid-1700s and had reached eighteen in 1783. Towards the middle of the 1800s, soap factories in the settlements within the borders of the Ottoman Empire began to consume about 22% of the average olive oil production. Before these years, soap production technology was well known in the Ottoman Empire; because important soap factories were already active, especially in Ottoman Syria. Especially Nablus, the ancient city of Palestine, was famous for its large soap making workshops from the early 1800s to the 1900s. All of these workshops were protected from being divided among numerous heirs and thus from disappearing, as they were turned into foundations enjoyed by the families of those who employed them.
In 1700, French immigrants started olive cultivation on the new continent by planting olives in nineteen settlements on the California coast. Its use in American kitchens will become widespread in the 1920s.
Starting from the second half of the 1700s, olive oil, which was "deteriorated" by deliberate exposure to heat and light, began to be used in the dye industry. In those years, olive oil was an important export product of the Ottoman Empire to Europe through French traders. Paint manufacturers begin to use olive oil in the production of a dye called Turkish Red or Edirne Red [kök dye] - a technology obviously imported from the Ottoman world. The raw material for color is derived from the root of the rubia plant, the dyeing process is a complex process that takes up to forty hours, requiring fabrics to be washed multiple times in olive oil, sheep manure and other ingredients in lye. In the 1700s, olive oil was also used to process wool used for imitation 'Tunisian bones' (fez), which was produced in different countries of Europe and exported to the Ottoman lands. By the end of the century, after this market had dwindled, caps similar to fez became popular with workers in southern France.
On the shores of the Aegean region, there is evidence that table grapes were kept in olive oil for preservation in the 1700s. It is not known when this technique replaced the mustard seed, which was used for this purpose in the past, and how it caused a change in the taste of the grape.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, with the industrialization period, industrial type, steam power, oil and soap processing plants appeared on the scene. With chemical and mechanical methods, it becomes possible to extract the waste oil contained in olive seeds and use it in soap or grease making. The merchants, who own the facilities that produce fast and large quantities in the olive growing sector and start to get rich by trading, begin to transform social relations. A new bourgeois class emerges, seeking to mobilize the people and capital needed for modern olive processing plants and soap industries. These merchants, who have economic dominance over the peasants and have the power to impose their conditions on the small producers, create their own capital accumulation. For example, when Lesbos joined the Greek state in 1912, there were one hundred and thirteen steam-powered oil presses. The majority of the facilities in Lesvos were built by machinery companies in Izmir.
In 1927, centrifugal (centrifugal) technology, which is considered to be the pioneer of the continuous (uninterrupted) system, which is today's modern method of obtaining olive oil, was used for the first time to obtain olive oil, and it is still used today. it still continues.
In the 19th century, between the two world wars, olive oil refineries began to spread, producing cheap olive oil called “refined olive oil”, which is often used to imitate quality olive oils. Refined oil is less pure than natural olive oil, when compared to the chemical methods used in its production, mechanical pressure and centrifugation, the oil obtained is far from its "natural" state. This development was realized as an action to meet the olive oil needs of the increasing urban population and especially low-income social strata. These developments are followed by the realization of the damage caused to the natural environment by the residues produced during the processing of high tonnage olives with industrial fraud (corruption; olive oil production mixed with other oils). After these awarenesses, policies will be developed regarding how to protect the environment from environmental pollution caused by not properly disposing of waste or residue in this sector.
With the establishment of the European Economic Community and the implementation of the Common Agricultural Policy in 1958, the final phase in the history of olive trees around the Mediterranean begins. Olive oil is among the agricultural products supported by the state. The first country to profit from this policy was Italy, then Greece, while Spain and Portugal could enter the club in 1986. At the same time, European support funds help olive oil production plant owners modernize their technological equipment.
Today, the support of the states to the olive sector has been seriously trimmed, especially in our country, most olive producers have started to produce at a loss. Despite this phenomenon, the spread of olive groves and people's protection of their own olive groves did not decrease, on the contrary, they started to increase. There must be more than one reason for this seemingly paradoxical fact; Humanity has thousands of years of history with olive trees and olive oil, harvesting one's own olives and producing their own olive oil is likely to create a sense of satisfaction. It also brings a sense of security; Today's conscious consumers, despite the presence of high-quality brands in the market, have an instinctive distrust of olive oil that has gone through industrial production processes. XX. century, olive oil; It has become the most sought-after edible and raw oil, surpassing not only other oils pressed from seeds, but also butter. In these modern times, where communication and access to information have become almost ordinary, conscious consumers; They have become more inquisitive and selective about their diet, the content of the food they consume and the functionality of this content. Concern about healthy eating among people without medical training has only come to the fore in the last two or three decades. Today, researchers dealing with olive science define premium olive oil as a functional food.
In the history of olive oil, the interaction of olive producers, technology and industrialists, property relations, traders, international monopolies, consumers and the symbolic meanings of olives, albeit emotionally, still continues. The issues that need research on are not only how to improve production technologies and the nature of olive cultivation. Interrelationships of socio-economic classes involved in olive cultivation and market, non-governmental organizations related to the sector, cooperatives, state policies, good agricultural practices, how olive oil trade processes are shaped in a global world market, consumer awareness, olive research and olive oil-health relationship. scientific research is also a considerable subject.
Olive and olive oil production and consumption has been the communication object of agriculture, industry, rural and city throughout the history of the Mediterranean peoples, and this situation continues unchanged today. This sector, which is a source of income for the poor in both rural and urban areas and a source of profit for entrepreneurs and traders, has started to evolve into an area where agricultural science and gastronomy are also interested. Time will tell us where the class and conflicts of interest between small and large olive producers, olive grove owners and propertyless poor agricultural workers, oil/soap factory owners and workers, producers and marketers will change in the future.
Today, the historical details of the olive tree and its cultivation continue with paleo-ethno-botanical studies. While researches are carried out to transform the olive into a more productive cultivated plant, on the other hand, ways to increase the quality of olive oil obtained from its fruit and the amount of phytochemicals that are shown to be beneficial for human health are sought.
Compiled by: Uğur Saraçoğlu (ugisaracoglu@yahoo.com)
Resources:
1. Olive's Journey in the Mediterranean; Conference Proceedings, Dr. Alp Yucel Kaya, Ertekin Akpinar, 2016.
2. World Olive Encyclopedia; International Olive Council; Fausso Luchetti, 1997.
3. Historical Development of Olive Oil Production Techniques and Comparison with Each Other, Taner Gülal, Master Thesis, Uludağ University Institute of Science and Technology, Department of Food Engineering, 2015.
4. History of Olive; Lecture Notes: 3, Dr. Mücahit Kivrak, Balikesir University Edremit Vocational School, Olive Growing Department.
5. Olive and Olive Oil from Past to Present, World-Mediterranean-Turkey; Aytac Eryılmaz, January 2020.
7. romeandart.eu.