Saint Spiridon Blog

Emai Agrotis

The life and times of an olive farmer (and his wife!)

You will remember, if you read the first instalment ,how in June last year we fell in love with a beautiful valley here in East Crete and how in very short order we were buying a chunk of it.

Or to be precise, five chunks of it .

Through our sales agent we had been introduced to a smashing young chap who, like many of the younger generation here, was losing interest in living in a small mountain village farming the land and was more interested in a business in the big city (or Sitia in this case) and sports cars rather than donkeys. So, after a small amount of negotiation a sale was agreed and the “Topographical Engineer” instructed to make a plan of the land.

If you’ve not yet been through the buying process there are a number of pitfalls awaiting the unwary, especially since there is little in the way of a land registry here in Greece. One of the essentials is to get a topography made, preferably using GPS technology, and to ensure that the neighbours agree with the lines the topographer is drawing. Of course , it also helps if the chap selling you the land has a firm knowledge himself of what he owns! His level of disinterest seemed pretty high and on two occasions we had to call in “Dad” to tell the topographer where the lines should be drawn. “Dad” knows every tree and every bump in the ground for miles around, who owns what and probably what they’re worth.

We sat down that first night, mad fools that we were, and dreamt our dreams of an easy life watching trees grow and getting paid for it.

We also tried to name each of the five plots of olives so that we could conveniently refer to them in the future. There were “the terraces”, but then there were “the other terraces”, there was “the house plot” where we’d like to build our own house. But then we changed our mind about where we’d like to build our own house. Twice. Argued about it. And this, bear in mind, before we had the wherewithal to build a house anyway. There was “the little plot”, and that name has stuck. There was “the first big terraced plot by the road” which has now become “the pruned plot” , because it’s a much shorter name and, as I’ll describe later in this series, there was just a little bit of pruning to do. So now the trees are much shorter too.

There was the awkward plot for which no name suggested itself . It’s now called the “new house plot”. Not because that’s where we’d like to build ourselves, but because we noticed that the topography showed the plot as about 3000 square meters, but the original contract of the guy selling us the land showed it as much larger. “Dad” was called in, another topography made, and “Oh yeah, there’s the valley as well as the bit with the olives on”. The valley made the overall size 6,000 square meters , and as you can build on anything over 4,000 the plot had moved from being non-buildable to buildable. Hence “New House Plot”. “Dad” is the father of the guy that sold us the olive trees. When we first met he seemed a little frosty, but as we have spent more time working the land so we have got to know him as a generous and kind soul, always ready to offer advice and help and the hardest man to buy a drink for, as he’s already bought the round.

Of course we’d never build on the “New House Plot” anyway. The trees are far too nice and we’ve been introduced now, and shared hugs when no locals were watching, so it would be rude to chop them down just to build a house.

This type of lunatic tree loving stuff tends to overtake you when you realise that some of the trees you have are well over a hundred and fifty years old. Cutting them down would be like stabbing your granny. We are only custodians of our trees, taking care of them for future generations.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 9:54 am and is filed under Buying olive trees... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.