Day 48: The good oil

In the afternoon, Johannes came by to collect us all and take us down to Syros's olive press to see his harvest being turned into oil. Just as we were about to leave, however, I noticed that one of the cats, a timid little calico by the name of Lovely, wasn't in a good way. She had been sick for a while and had been making some horrible hacking noises over the past few days, but now she was huddled up in one of the boxes mewling pitifully. Kate gave Flora a call and she asked us to put Lovely in a cage so we could take her to the vet later.

Once we had caught her, we set off in convoy and were met at the press by Johannes's nephew (whose name, I think, is Yannis), who quickly set about helping Johannes to get the olives out of his little car. The press was a hive of activity, with various locals coming in with their olives and leaving with their containers of oil, all watched over by a random cast of grizzled characters whose connection to proceedings was unclear.

Both Johannes and Yannis gave me a description of how the process works, but what with the din of the process itself, my understanding was somewhat tenuous. In essence, I'm pretty sure that it works like this. The olives are first emptied into a big hopper, from which they are drawn upwards by a series of little 'cups' on a conveyor belt. This then dumps them into a machine that sucks out all of the leaves. Next, the olives are washed and then mashed up into a paste, which is heated and churned to get all of the oil out. The oil is then put through a centrifuge to spin away all of the water before emerging from a spout and pouring into a big collecting tub. All the while, the pulp is dropping onto a big ever-growing pile outside, later to be used as fuel to heat the apparatus or as mulch. Johannes was delighted with the results – his one and a quarter tonnes of olives yielded about 200 litres of oil, of which he gifted us three litres. 

The finished product: this year's oil front and right, last year's to the left

By the time we got back to the house it was getting dark, but there was still the matter of Lovely to be resolved. So, I stayed back at the house and cooked dinner while Kate, Flora and the girls took her to the vet – who was apparently rather shocked at the state of her and decided to keep her in overnight.