Students Use Podcast to Preserve Heritage of Karaburun’s Date Olives

Summary

A group of stu­dents in Turkey is using a pod­cast to raise aware­ness about the Erkence olive vari­ety, which is unique for its nat­ural process of becom­ing date olives with­out pro­cess­ing. The pod­cast high­lights the inter­gen­er­a­tional knowl­edge and chal­lenges faced by farm­ers in pre­serv­ing tra­di­tional agri­cul­ture prac­tices in the region.

A group of stu­dents in Turkey is using a ded­i­cated pod­cast to help pre­serve cul­tural her­itage and local agri­cul­ture on the Karaburun Peninsula in the Gulf of Izmir. Their focus is on one of the Mediterranean’s most dis­tinc­tive fruits: the so-called date olives pro­duced by the Erkence vari­ety.

Considered among the old­est olive vari­eties in the east­ern Mediterranean, Erkence is known for a rare nat­ural process that can remove the fruit’s bit­ter­ness while it is still on the branch. Under spe­cific con­di­tions of dew, wind, and sun­light, the olives become a sweet local del­i­cacy known as hurma zey­tini, or date olives. Unlike most table olives, which must be cured or oth­er­wise processed before they can be eaten, these fruits can some­times be con­sumed directly from the tree.

“Erkence isn’t just the heart of agri­cul­ture, but also the cen­ter­piece of Karaburun’s coun­try­side and olive cul­ti­va­tion cul­ture,” Selin Bektaş, a local olive farmer and teacher in Izmir, told Olive Oil Times. ​“Traditional agri­cul­tural poli­cies, har­vest­ing processes and local con­sump­tion prac­tices have been shaped by this prod­uct. It helps bring peo­ple closer to olive cul­ti­va­tion.”

The trans­for­ma­tion behind date olives depends not only on the Erkence vari­ety itself, but also on a del­i­cate inter­ac­tion between the local micro­cli­mate and a nat­u­rally occur­ring fun­gus, Phoma oleae, which reduces the fruit’s bit­ter­ness while it remains on the branch.

“We have seen repeat­edly in the news and media that cur­rent-day agri­cul­ture and food secu­rity are under risk because of cli­mate change,” the stu­dents told Olive Oil Times. ​“These risks affect large areas through­out our world, but we wanted to focus on the effect where we live, in the beau­ti­ful Aegean Region.”

Turkey’s agri­cul­tural sec­tor is at a demo­graphic and cli­matic cross­roads. The stu­dents cited the lat­est OECD-FAO data, not­ing that agri­cul­tural labor in Turkey accounted for about 30 per­cent of the work­force at the start of the 2000s and has since fallen to roughly 15 per­cent.

According to OECD-FAO analy­ses, the decline reflects a broader struc­tural shift as younger gen­er­a­tions leave rural areas for urban jobs. While mech­a­niza­tion has stream­lined pro­duc­tion in much of Anatolia, labor-inten­sive sec­tors such as Erkence groves increas­ingly rely on tech­nol­ogy out of neces­sity rather than effi­ciency alone.

“We saw cli­mate change had a dras­tic effect. This is how we real­ized fur­ther use of tech­nol­ogy was cru­cial,” the stu­dents said. They pointed to a data-dri­ven approach that includes drones for pest mon­i­tor­ing and auto­mated irri­ga­tion to help man­age drought.

Still, they said the answer is not tech­nol­ogy alone. ​“The knowl­edge and work our ances­tors pro­vided us with in agri­cul­ture will, with­out a doubt, pro­duce healthy solu­tions if com­bined with tech­nol­ogy.”

That idea shapes the struc­ture of the stu­dents’ pod­cast, in which the story of the Erkence olive unfolds through a con­ver­sa­tion among three gen­er­a­tions of the same fam­ily: a grand­fa­ther, his daugh­ter and his grand­daugh­ter. The for­mat reflects their view that the pres­sures fac­ing tra­di­tional agri­cul­ture are not the result of a sin­gle moment, but of deci­sions and chal­lenges accu­mu­lated over time. As the stu­dents put it, each gen­er­a­tion leaves ​“small scars” that grad­u­ally shape the con­di­tions farm­ers face today.

At the same time, the three voices point to a pos­si­ble path for­ward. The grand­fa­ther rep­re­sents inher­ited knowl­edge and long expe­ri­ence with the land, the daugh­ter embod­ies the present gen­er­a­tion nav­i­gat­ing a chang­ing agri­cul­tural land­scape, and the grand­daugh­ter rep­re­sents the future and the respon­si­bil­i­ties of younger peo­ple. Through that dia­logue, the pod­cast argues that pre­serv­ing crops such as the Erkence olive will require inter­gen­er­a­tional coop­er­a­tion.

For Bektaş, the stu­dents are cap­tur­ing a deep rela­tion­ship between peo­ple and land­scape that has shaped the cul­ti­va­tion of the Erkence olive for cen­turies.

“The Erkence type started its devel­op­ment in the region’s moun­tains and rivers with the help of black­birds,” she said. ​“The birds eat pre­vi­ously matured olives and soften the pits. The soft­ened pits are brought to the soil, and then to farms.”

At the base of the Karaburun Peninsula lies the ancient Ionian city of Klazomenai, where archae­ol­o­gists uncov­ered one of the ear­li­est known olive oil pro­duc­tion instal­la­tions in the world, dat­ing to the sixth cen­tury BCE. The com­plex included stone crush­ers and lever-press sys­tems designed to process olives on a scale sug­gest­ing orga­nized, near-indus­trial pro­duc­tion more than 2,600 years ago.

In more recent times, olive cul­ti­va­tion spread across the penin­sula as local agri­cul­ture grad­u­ally shifted, a tran­si­tion Bektaş recalls from her own family’s expe­ri­ence. ​“Previously the region was a leader in grow­ing tobacco plants and grapes, but as the hard­ships faced in the cul­ti­va­tion and trad­ing process began to grow, the farm­land started to be used for olives,” she said.

“I remem­ber from my child­hood that there were olive seeds in between the grape farms,” Bektaş added. ​“As the olives matured, the grape logs were cut. It was sort of a flag race, and it was time for the olives to run.”

Bektaş said Erkence olives mature ear­lier than most other vari­eties and are among the soft­est and most frag­ile fruits in the Oleaceae fam­ily. That makes them unsuit­able for the har­vest­ing meth­ods com­monly used for other olives. ​“Vibrating trees from their roots helps reg­u­lar olives fall and a large cloth is placed under to catch them. This col­lec­tion pro­ce­dure is unsuit­able for Erkence olives,” she explained, not­ing that the fruit must remain on the branch long enough for the nat­ural trans­for­ma­tion into date olives to occur.

In the peninsula’s dis­tinc­tive ecol­ogy, har­vest­ing Erkence is a high-stakes race. The fruit reaches its prized hurma sweet­ness only when it is ready to fall nat­u­rally to the ground, mak­ing tim­ing crit­i­cal. For gen­er­a­tions, local fam­i­lies have fol­lowed a labor-inten­sive rit­ual, enter­ing the groves at dawn each day to gather the de-bit­tered olives at peak qual­ity.

When the olives are milled, the result­ing oil is gen­er­ally mild and appre­ci­ated locally. But because pri­or­ity is often given to pro­duc­ing date olives, Erkence oil is not always pro­duced under the same qual­ity-focused con­di­tions as more spe­cial­ized olive oils.

“Erkence har­vest­ing is a wheel of sur­prises rang­ing from November to January, in which it is required to be present in the farm­land every day,” Bektaş said. Farmers must also com­pete with wildlife drawn to the sweet fruit. ​“The taste and sweet­ness of the date olives attract birds and wild boars as well as humans.”

The stu­dents’ pod­cast was devel­oped as part of an envi­ron­men­tal edu­ca­tion ini­tia­tive asso­ci­ated with Türkiye Çevre Eğitim Vakfı (TÜRÇEV), a Turkish foun­da­tion focused on envi­ron­men­tal aware­ness in schools.