The enchanted forest of Makri with the ancient olive trees.(photos)
The enchanted forest of Makri with the ancient olive trees
The spring grass has laid a lush carpet in the ancient olive grove of Makri, with giant olive trees emerging from the morning mist like eerie sculptures, their trunks intertwined and twisted. It is a forest open-museum, vast and mysterious, as if enchanted.
Here, the youngest olive trees are at least 500 years old and the oldest ones are up to 2,000 years old, which means that some of them in their youth "saw with their own eyes" Constantine the Great passing through on his way from Rome to Byzantium, the new capital of the Roman Empire.
The Kelidis family, led by Niki and her husband Argyris, took over the family estates along with the art of olive oil production in 1982 and then set up their own olive press. Today, their daughter Valia has joined the production and she is showing me around a piece of the family olive grove.
We walk together for over forty minutes and all I see are giant braided trunks that have been hugged over the centuries and continue to grow so tightly bound. "There are ancient olive trees elsewhere throughout Greece, it's just that in Makri they are clustered in large numbers in a compact olive grove, having survived the fires that plague other olive-growing areas," explains Valia. Its size is not comparable to that of the huge olive groves in the Peloponnese, for example.
There are no more than 200,000 olive trees here, 'about as many as a single village in Messinia', says Valia, jokingly.
See the whole article here
https://www.gastronomos.gr/topikes-kouzines/ellada/to-magemeno-dasos-tis-makris-me-tis-archaies-elies/198140/