In Turkey, Father and Son Rediscover Roots to Craft Award-Winning EVOO

It took only a short trip to an olive grove in Turkey five years ago for Eugen Prundeanu and his son Alex to decide that olive oil pro­duc­tion was yet another busi­ness sec­tor they would enter.

“There’s some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing and peace­ful when you step into an olive grove,” Eugen Prundeanu told Olive Oil Times. ​“You’ll sense it as a won­der­ful pres­ence, as a gift.”

“To us, father and son, it felt some­what sim­i­lar: a won­der­ful moment of togeth­er­ness, peace, a sort of priv­i­lege,” he added. ​“Somehow, we knew this feel­ing embod­ied a hid­den promise, but we had no idea what it was. We decided to explore this invit­ing path.”

The flash of inspi­ra­tion they found among the olive trees took shape and devel­oped into Darvari Gida Tarim, an olive farm in the vil­lage of Mecidiye, near Çanakkale in the north­west of Turkey.

“Our groves are a breeze away from the Sea of Marmara, next to the Dardanelles Strait, in the area of Geyikli,” Prundeanu said. ​“You can meet us for a cup of tea in our main office in Çanakkale and from there it is but a short drive to our vil­lage farm in Mecidiye, between Geyikli, Troy and Ida Mountain.”

However, Prundeanu, who is of Romanian descent, real­ized from the out­set that this was an occu­pa­tion unlike any other in his hec­tic career in indus­trial man­u­fac­tur­ing – one that would prompt him to retrace the foot­steps of his fam­ily back to his ances­tral land.

“We dis­cov­ered that our fam­ily had his­tor­i­cal ties with that estranged place in Çanakkale and that they owned olive groves there,” he said. ​“A few cen­turies back, the Darvari fam­ily was a cat­a­lyst for eco­nomic and cul­tural growth in the Balkans, and they are still remem­bered in Romania as the founders of a beau­ti­ful lit­tle Orthodox church and monastery in Bucharest, the Darvari Skete. We cher­ish this per­sonal legacy, and it was, for years, a good omen for the Darvari Holding as a whole.”

“Yet, the olive grove we bought in Turkey was a turn in a com­pletely new direc­tion, a redis­cov­ery of our roots, of the joy of the land,” Prundeanu added. ​“This is why we call our olive oil project the Darvari Garden.”

The olive farm of Darvari boasts more than 30 hectares of groves cov­ered with 6,000 olive trees of the Edremit and Ayvalik vari­eties.

The com­pany has also set its sights on the cur­rently untapped and unex­plored Hanım Parmağı, an olive vari­ety endemic to the Ezine-Geyikli region.

“The Hanım Parmağı vari­ety is the local star we are set to put to a bet­ter use,” Prundeanu said. ​“The lab results of the oil extracted from these olives were very promis­ing, to say the least, so we use it for graft­ing and increas­ing the grove when needed.”

Darvari has also launched an eight-year-long pro­gram to mon­i­tor sta­tis­tics for vir­tu­ally every tree on the farm, includ­ing their age and size, health, har­vested olive quan­tity and its peri­od­ic­ity, type and quan­tity of organic fer­til­izer use and test results for the leaves of the olive trees.

“We are slowly get­ting deeper and deeper into get­ting to know our trees ​‘per­son­ally’,” Prundeanu said. ​“Obviously, this also gives us at any time a gran­u­lar view as well as a nuanced ver­sion of the big pic­ture.”

An estab­lished entre­pre­neur, Prundeanu brought the ded­i­ca­tion and method­i­cal plan­ning from his indus­trial man­u­fac­tur­ing busi­ness to his olive oil busi­ness, dous­ing the lat­ter with an essence of tra­di­tion and local com­pe­tence.

“Returns on invest­ments in this type of farm­ing indus­try usu­ally take decades, so I think the input of the Darvari Holding strate­gic devel­op­ment expe­ri­ence was prov­i­den­tial,” he said. ​“But even more so, the very local expe­ri­ence we inte­grate in these facil­i­ties is invalu­able, as we strive to main­tain a tra­di­tional per­spec­tive on the whole process of olive oil pro­duc­tion. This is essen­tial.”

In addi­tion, using nat­ural pest repel­lents, care­fully man­ag­ing water sup­plies for irri­ga­tion, and pro­tect­ing local vari­eties are fun­da­men­tal prac­tices at Darvari Gida Tarim.

“Clearly, I’m biased, but I still think tra­di­tional olive oil pro­duc­ers were never in the busi­ness of harm­ing the planet,” Prundeanu said in jest. ​“We even design cus­tom equip­ment and tools for har­vest­ing to pre­serve the qual­ity of olives and pro­tect the trees from harm. It is not only our norm but that of the gen­uine olive oil cul­ture.”

Prundeanu was also quick to acknowl­edge the para­mount con­tri­bu­tion of Darvari’s employ­ees to the company’s pros­per­ity.

“The late Erdinc Uzden, whose mem­ory we pre­serve with grat­i­tude and respect, was piv­otal in open­ing our per­spec­tive to the olive oil cul­ture,” he said. ​“We first met under a 500-year-old olive tree and shook hands to estab­lish our col­lab­o­ra­tion in the tra­di­tional way.”

“We also received pre­cious advice from the good-hearted Kardes Sinan Erdogan, Darvari̇ Gida Tarimdogan and we ben­e­fit from the energy of our gen­eral man­ager, Cem Murat Erdilek,” he added. ​“Engin and Ihsan Yilmaz, who com­bined have over a cen­tury of expe­ri­ence, are entrusted with the farm­ing activ­i­ties.”

The com­pany is cur­rently in the process of cre­at­ing a ver­ti­cally inte­grated pro­duc­tion com­plex on-site, cov­er­ing all the required processes from extrac­tion to stor­age and pack­ag­ing of olive oil.

“We expect to use it for next year’s har­vest,” Prundeanu said. ​“The mill, with a total capac­ity of 140 tons per day, will be installed in a new Assos Stone build­ing. Storage-wise, we’ll grow the ini­tial 550 tons capac­ity to a com­mu­nity-size of 2,500 tons, avail­able for the neigh­bor­ing farms’ needs as well as ours.”

Darvari has also devel­oped notable activ­ity in the local com­mu­nity by sup­port­ing the found­ing of the Çanakkale Olive and Olive Oil Producers Association and by join­ing a busi­ness ven­ture with other local pro­duc­ers and the Geyikli Agricultural Development Cooperative.

“This way, we added 15,000 more olive trees to a local cir­cuit of best prac­tices and mutual ben­e­fit,” Prundeanu said.

The first local olive oil feast, sched­uled for this autumn in Çanakkale, is next on their agenda.

“As is the case in such local gath­er­ings, we’ll show and test our prod­ucts next to our neigh­bors’,” Prundeanu said. ​“On the one hand, our nat­u­rally brine-cured green and black olives, and, of course, our extra vir­gin olive oil in both our trade­mark brands, Darvari Ottoman and Byzantium by Darvari.”

The extra vir­gin olive oils of Darvari were a source of gen­uine pride for the com­pany at the tenth edi­tion of the NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition this year.

The pro­ducer earned four awards – two Gold and two Silver Awards – lead­ing the way among Turkish entrants.

Furthermore, Darvari climbed up the lad­der of suc­cess in the com­pe­ti­tion after only three years in the busi­ness, being extremely quick on the uptake.

“It is great that we were able to estab­lish a major ref­er­ence point at the 2022 NYIOOC,” Prundeanu said with grat­i­fi­ca­tion. ​“It helps to remem­ber that this com­pe­ti­tion has been part of our jour­ney since we started three years ago.”

“Like many times in life, when we look back, we clearly see some of our mis­steps,” he added. ​“It was pre­cisely the sum of pre­vi­ous fail­ures that made us lis­ten, via an invis­i­ble pro­fes­sional dia­logue between Çanakkale and New York.”

“Branding-wise, in our per­sonal quest, we are sim­ply try­ing to ​‘catch up’ with the good name the Darvari fam­ily had for cen­turies in cul­ture, spir­i­tu­al­ity, and phil­an­thropy,” Prundeanu con­tin­ued. ​“It is also essen­tial to be able to show that we are not usurpers of the his­tor­i­cal legacy of names like Byzantium or Ottoman.”

Primarily an export-ori­ented com­pany, Darvari’s mar­ket­ing strat­egy has been infused with the exper­tise of its founder, look­ing to offer an opti­mized expe­ri­ence to con­sumers.

“We don’t just go for the mar­ket shelf, we try to estab­lish our pres­ence and cre­ate aware­ness about Darvari Garden in par­tic­u­lar, but also about the extra vir­gin olive oil qual­i­ties in gen­eral,” Prundeanu said.

“Such a cam­paign meant dis­trib­ut­ing 12,000 Darvari Ottoman and Byzantium bot­tles to bet­ter estab­lish a future con­sumer dia­logue plat­form,” he added. ​“The bet is that our rep­u­ta­tion will pre­cede us.”

However, Prundeanu pointed out that the road ahead is not always laid with rose petals for small pro­duc­ers who have to strive for their long-term via­bil­ity.

“A gen­uine dif­fi­culty we face in Çanakkale (and maybe a com­mon one for all other regions in Turkey or even all over the world) is how to imple­ment mod­ern and strate­gic man­age­ment tools to help small and mid­dle-sized farms and farm­ers sur­vive,” he said. ​“It is a beau­ti­ful life, it is a hard life.”

The pro­ducer added that the com­ple­tion of the Darvari Garden com­plex in Mecidiye is the next essen­tial mile­stone for the com­pany and their entire farm­ing fam­ily in Çanakkale.

“However, our real chal­lenge is to have the same level of qual­ity for our entire pro­duc­tion and even estab­lish it as a com­mu­nity best prac­tice stan­dard in the area of Geyikli,” he said.

“The out­come of these efforts is yet unknown, but we are con­fi­dent in our jour­ney,” Prundeanu con­cluded. ​“You see, we have this won­der­ful, holy tree from God, a most pre­cious gift, like the green of our gar­den. We want to share its fruits and health with you all.”