My Olive Filled Adventure - Part 2 Sparta

On our way back from our trip to Kalamata, Allison and I decided to stop into Sparta (or Sparti).  I figured that the famous Spartan army was reason enough to make the stop, but Sparta has another great site, well worth checking out for the Olive fanatic.

The Museum of the Olive and Greek Olive Oil, is a mouthful to say, but it's a great place to visit.  It's a beautiful building full of olive history and information.  You wouldn't think that there would be that much to talk about with olives, but this museum really shows how important this little fruit was, and is, to the world.

The first part of the exhibit is all about the history of the olive, including these ancient fossilized olive branches.  They also explain the differences in the many varieties of olives (there are dozens of varieties), and how olives have changed the coarse of many civilizations.

My favorite part of the exhibits was the giant olive presses and grinders.

This is an ancient mortar and pestle, one of the earliest ways people extracted oils and paste from olives.

This giant corkscrew press would smush the olives until the oil would drip into the bucket bellow.

All over Greece you find that many of the ancient buildings are fabricated using old olive grinding stones.  They're round stones with a hole in the middle, and they weigh a ton.  I never really could figure out how these grinding stones worked, until I saw a traditional grinder at the Olive Museum.

Did you know that olive oil also works as a fuel for lights.  Churches and homes all over the Mediterranean used to use olive oil to light up their homes.  I'd love to get an old oil lamp and try this out myself, I never knew olive oil was that flammable.

Here's another bonus I discovered on our road trip.  Did you know that you can improve chicken souvlaki?  As with just about anything, all you have to do is ad bacon.

CC