subject: Olive Oil: The Varieties Of Olives [print this page] Various were the use of oil for religious purposes. Libations made with oil srous altars, tombstones or rubbed onto espendan sacred stones. H ancient use of oil and wine in the burial ritual has been preserved in the Christian religion.
The olives were key component of the diet, particularly those working outside the home having lunch in the countryside, traveling, or campaigns. The olives are available for such use as easily transported, unchanged and have great nutritional value. In several excavations have found pits from olives that are food residues. The ancient writers save information on a wide variety of edible olives. Thlastai elaiai was probably a crushed black olive, which indicated that it was palatable. Natant named sailed olives in brine. Their consumption was widespread. The Almades was similar to the previous range. Perhaps it is a swim in the first stage of treatment with salt. The Gongylai called spherical olives, possibly current karydoelies. Drypeteis were wrinkled ripe olives consumed without treatment. The melainai mentioned by Athenaeus that it was difficult to digest. The pityridai were small, had the color of the bran and harvested before maturity. The black olives were stemfylides of which was the marc, crushed olive paste, who along with herbs, oil and vinegar made the epityron, which obviously consumed with cheese.
The treatment of some types of olives for consumption did not differ from that of today. After get the bitterness and salt with water remained several hours in vinegar and finally stored in oil. For other species, however, using materials that are unusual for today's practice, ie after the states that get the bitterness put in vinegar, boiled wine and honey, adding herbs, fennel, cumin, rue, mint, coriander.
The wood and branches
Apart from the oil and olives, olive wood used as fuel, for wooden architecture, piles on the link columns, swabs for agricultural and other tools, but also for making idols of gods and other wooden statues.
The leaves and branches of olives used for mattresses. In four graves of Feres the late 5th century. BC, which saved a lot of organic items, the dead were placed in a thick layer of olive clones. Apparently this happened in other tombs in which organic materials are not maintained. In Syracuse, where voting for ostracism, the name of what they wanted to exile written in ink on olive leaves (petalismos). In some cases, ostracism with olive leaves and the House voted in Athens (ekfylloforia).
It is therefore clear that the olive - the olive oil, olives, wood and even leaves - was dominant presence in private and public life of the Greeks. But in the Greek countryside dominated by olive trees a wonderful scene of life, which undoubtedly affected the austere and harmonious aesthetic developed.
This season is the season of fruit harvesting, during which the population of the Greek countryside works hard in the olive groves, like his ancestors from ancient times until today, warming the cold days with their voices, the sounds of sticks and saws and unstoppable music of the precious fruit which falls on the sails.
