Meet the Pioneering Couple Who Introduced Olive Growing to One Greek Island

Summary

Tassis and Rena Laskaridis started Lemnos’ first olive grove after relo­cat­ing to the island in 2007, despite hav­ing no pre­vi­ous agri­cul­tural expe­ri­ence. They now pro­duce pre­mium, organic olive oil at their farm, Ktima Olon, which is high in polyphe­nols and exported to mul­ti­ple coun­tries, inspir­ing other farm­ers on the island to switch to olive farm­ing as well.

When Tassis and Rena Laskaridis relo­cated from Athens to the north­ern Aegean island of Lemnos in 2007, they were sur­prised by how few olive trees grew on the island.

Though they had no pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence in agri­cul­ture (Tassis was a retired archi­tect and Rena, a French teacher) they decided to use their land to start Lemnos’ first olive grove.

“There were vir­tu­ally no olive trees on the island at the time, and we were curi­ous to see whether Lemnos could pro­duce qual­ity olive oil,” Rena told Olive Oil Times. ​“We planted 300 olive trees, and the out­come was sur­pris­ingly sat­is­fy­ing.”

Today, the cou­ple pro­duces olive oil at the pri­vately-owned mill they built on Lemnos from hand-picked olives on their farm near the vil­lage of Kontias.

“We are expand­ing, and we cur­rently grow 1,850 olive trees at our Ktima Olon farm,” Laskaridis said. ​“We pro­duce a pre­mium, early-har­vested and unfil­tered organic extra vir­gin olive oil.”

“The har­vest is done by hand in October, and we process the olives within a few hours,” she added. ​“The spe­cial­ized equip­ment we use deliv­ers a clear oil, free of impu­ri­ties, so there is no need to sub­mit it to fil­tra­tion.”

“We mar­ket our oil in Greece, mainly Athens and Thessaloniki, and locally on the island,” she con­tin­ued. ​“We also export to Finland and are cur­rently nego­ti­at­ing to start export­ing to France and the United Kingdom.”

Laskaridis said the olive oil of Ktima Olon is high in polyphe­nols, bear­ing a health claim that meets the E.U. reg­u­la­tion 432/2012 require­ments.

The reg­u­la­tion spec­i­fies that olive oils con­tain­ing a cer­tain amount of polyphe­nols – at least 5 mil­ligrams per 20 grams of olive oil – can con­tribute to the pro­tec­tion of blood lipids from oxida­tive stress.

However, the far­m’s Throumbolia cul­ti­var, which the cou­ple used to com­ple­ment the Koroneiki, Adramytini and Manaki trees they had ini­tially planted, has proven to be a real game-changer.

“The Throumbolia trees turned out to be very pro­duc­tive on Lemnos, equal to the Koroneiki trees,” Laskaridis said. ​“The olives of this cul­ti­var con­tain 20 to 28 per­cent oil with excel­lent organolep­tic char­ac­ter­is­tics.”

Yiorgos Kostelenos, an agron­o­mist spe­cial­iz­ing in Greek olive vari­eties from the Peloponnese who sup­plied the Laskaridis cou­ple with the trees for their olive grove, said that Throumbolia is a promi­nent cul­ti­var, well-suited for the weather con­di­tions pre­vail­ing in the Aegean Sea.

“Throumbolia is endemic to the islands of the Aegean,” Kostelenos told Olive Oil Times. ​“The oil extracted from Throumbolia olives is rich in phe­no­lic com­pounds, espe­cially those that exist in lower quan­ti­ties in other cul­ti­vars such as the Oleokoronal.”

“However, the olives of the vari­ety are prone to fruit fly infec­tion,” he added. ​“Therefore, the strong Etesian winds that con­tin­u­ously buf­fet the islands of the arch­i­pel­ago cre­ate the per­fect habi­tat for Throumbolia trees because they keep the humid­ity lev­els low and pre­vent the pest from mul­ti­ply­ing.”

“There is a 6,000-year-old Throumbolia tree in Naxos, right at the cen­ter of the Aegean Sea, which still bears fruit,” Kostelenos con­tin­ued.

Having found solid ground in olive farm­ing, Ktima Olon has evolved into a fully-fledged agri­tourism estab­lish­ment accept­ing vis­i­tors look­ing to expe­ri­ence the allure of stay­ing on a farm and learn­ing about olive trees and olive oil.

Apart from olive trees, the own­ers grow var­i­ous other fruits and veg­eta­bles on their farm. They also keep a small num­ber of domes­tic ani­mals to obtain the milk for the tra­di­tional cheeses of Lemnos they pro­duce, the Melichloro and the Kalathaki.

Tassis and Rena Laskaridis advise their guests to add a cou­ple of table­spoons of the extra vir­gin olive oil of Ktima Olon to their meals to taste the oil’s fruity fla­vor and ben­e­fit from its nutri­tional prop­er­ties.

“We rec­om­mend con­sum­ing it raw in the morn­ing, on sal­ads, or with boiled and grilled veg­eta­bles and roasted meat,” they said. ​“The mildly bit­ter after­taste you may sense is the result of the low oil’s acid­ity, and a slight burn in your throat is caused by the ben­e­fi­cial com­pounds in our olive oil.”

The Laskaridis cou­ple’s suc­cess­ful olive oil ven­ture has also moti­vated other farm­ers on the island to switch to olive farm­ing. Rena Laskaridis esti­mated that around 70,000 olive trees are cur­rently cul­ti­vated on Lemnos.

“We are excited to see Lemnos among the olive oil-pro­duc­ing ter­ri­to­ries of Greece,” the cou­ple con­cluded. ​“Our dream is to be able to main­tain and improve [our farm] and at the same time enter the olive oil mar­kets more strongly.”

• Elaiaskarpos
• ERT