The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2)

by Carol Drinkwater

  In 1969, Diego Bonini, a citizen of Marsala, captain of a dredger that was supplying glassmakers with sand hauled up from the local seabed, began to notice splinters and cuts of wood in his scoops – vestiges of an ancient vessel. He was working north of Marsala, off the seaward side of an islet, the Isola Lunga, which faced out towards the Florios’ Favignana, the closest of the Egadi Islands. His modest findings led to an archaeological haul that stunned the world.

  And was about to stun me.

  Standing in front of the Phoenician galley that was disentombed piece by piece from the seabed and then reconstructed, pinned together on land, was a mind-blowing moment for me. More so because I had not been expecting it. There were bits missing, of course, but the boat was remarkably intact, even down to the Phoenician writing chiselled into several of the 3000-year-old hull planks. These boats were put together almost on a production line back in the Levant. From Tripoli to Tyre the Phoenicians were renowned for their boat-building skills. So, too, the inhabitants of Byblos long before the Phoenicians had reached the coast from Canaan. The cedar forests of Lebanon, today the centrepiece on the country’s flag, were eventually denuded, the soils eroded, because their timbers were so in demand by every seafaring nation. Even the Romans modelled their shipbuilding techniques on vessels such as the one I was gazing upon. This galley I was standing in front of had traversed the Mediterranean, had played its part in the development of the Mediterranean topography and personality. In the founding of the olive routes.

  I wandered off to have a look at the objects, also from the seabed, found aboard this ship. Hundreds of jars, amphorae, were on display. Used for the transportation of olive oil, olives and wine, they came from locations as far-reaching as Andalucía, mainland Italy, Greece, Corinth, Tunisia, Tripoli: all olive-producing regions. These tall terracotta pots gave substance to my journeys, to my quests. I saw the arteries unfold before me, the back and forth crossings, the business and production; it all sprang to life. I found rusted anchors, corks to seal the capacious amphorae, the shrivelled remains of olive drupes, granite olive presses and one unexpected contribution that caught my attention: cannabis leaves, still intact. Were the Phoenicians farming cannabis? Today, in the Beqaa Valley, cannabis is produced by the ton and sold illegally to fund the training and purchase of armaments required by Hezbollah to fight its war, but it had never occurred to me that the land we know today as Lebanon had historically been a grower of hashish.

  An elderly chap in a suit, loud scarlet tie, glasses and oil-slicked hair came over to greet me, to offer assistance. I had noticed him earlier acting as guide to a small group of Italians. I did not need a guide but the cannabis fascinated, puzzled me, and I asked him if he knew anything about it.

  ‘Consider how it must have been for those oarsmen,’ he smiled. ‘Rowing hour upon hour in all weathers. The cannabis was given to them as a muscle relaxant.’

  This signor had been a member of the original archaeological team who had itemised all the dredged articles and he had been coming to the museum every day for the past thirty years.

  ‘I’m voluntary. I just like being near that ship.’

  A lady, head round the door, called to the guide and he excused himself. I returned my attention to the glass case, and then I spotted it. An OLIVE SPRIG. That it had survived seemed incredible. Why was it aboard? Was it possible that this cutting was a peace offering, a Phoenician calling card? ‘We are traders, merchants, this is not a war ship.’ Had the notion of the olive as the tree of peace already been currency round the Med? I think so. The tale of the monumental flooding and the ark was an old one, in circulation before it found its way into the Old Testament. Had the story travelled beyond the eastern Mediterranean? Possibly. I was not sure, but the presence of this twig, this olive cutting, helped to substantiate my personal theory that in many of the coastal locations where the Phoenicians set up trading posts, they had not, as I had originally supposed, delivered sapling trees. They did not introduce the olive tree to the western Mediterranean, because the wild trees were already growing in vast forests close to many shorelines, and inland, too. How far north the tree had spawned by that stage, I did not know. Probably not to the cold environs of Altamira, but along the littoral of southern France, yes, across Italy, definitely, and in southern Spain. Tartessus, for example.

  I would also hazard a guess that the sprig I was staring at was one of clusters brought over to graft the wild trees. I was beginning to believe now that it was the spread of knowledge of cultivation rather than the plant itself that had been introduced and traded. They taught grafting. Does it make any difference? I think so. The topography was not altered, interfered with. It was the ability to husband what already existed that the Phoenicians, the sailors on these galleys, offered. Of course, they also bartered, sold other produce including ready-pressed oil, home-produced, or from other regions where they were trading – witness all the amphorae in this museum. Thinking about it, they might very well have been responsible for the earliest grape-growing here in Marsala, today a renowned region of viticulture.

  I suppose I was trying to find out at what stage agriculture had stopped working with nature. I swung about looking for the old man to discuss these thoughts, but he was nowhere to be found.

  Exiting the museum, right across the street from the sea, I spotted dolphins swimming close to the rocky shore. I set off at a lick, running in the road the length of the curving esplanade, following them in their northerly trajectory. A car pulled up outside Eno, one of the government-run wine shops. Three people got out. I yelled to them as I charged by, ‘Dolphins, delfini, delfini!’ But they paid me no attention, probably thought I was mad. I hugged the coast, listening to the slap-and-lick of waves against brown rocks, until I was panting, out of breath, and the sleek mammals had slipped beneath the gentle swells and did not resurface. Then I returned to my car, still thinking about the Phoenicians and set off again, hoping to reach Selinus, the most westerly of the ancient Greek colonies in Sicily, before nightfall.

  After a stop at the ancient quarries of Cave di Cusa, which I only found at the very tail end of the afternoon – the silent, empty place had an eerie vibe about it and struck me as more Neolithic temple, more sacrificial site, than a quarry – I searched in vain for a hotel. Bank holidays, no room at any inns. I continued making for Selinunte, travelling by lanes and not the main route. Passing through a seaside town, Tre Fontane, where the sand swept the streets like a snowdrift and everywhere was boarded up. Nobody about save three plump men sitting on white plastic chairs on the beach, silently watching the sea, waiting for the sun’s fall. And a remarkable sunset it proved to be even though I was driving away from it. Signs to Castelvetrano Selinunte, Città dell’Olivo, City of Olives. At some point around eight thirty, darkness upon me, I resigned myself to a night in the car and opted to continue on to the fishing spot of Marinella where I hoped to find a car park and possibly a bite to eat. A lovely old building set back from the road drew my attention. I slowed and decided to pull in to its gravelled courtyard. It was a hotel and, even more fortunate, it was a converted olive mill. A sprightly chap probably in his late sixties wearing a Panama day and night, inside and out, was both proprietor and renovator of the establishment – every room, situated off an upper quadrangled terrace, bore the name of a classical Greek personage. I was in the Dionysus suite.

  After breakfast the following morning the boss escorted me up on to the flat roof with newly tiled terrace to show off his 1300 olive trees in the surrounding groves and 360-degree view, with a soft, clear light in every direction. It was a view like no other and offered an exceptional perspective on ancient Selinus with its principal temple and the lapping Mediterranean at its feet.

  My companion confessed a passion for olive trees and was clutching a book written in both Latin and Greek, which he offered to lend me. Alas, I read neither. He eulogised the olive tree, ‘olivo bellissimo, bellissimo, with its fruits the colour of Athene’s eyes’.
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  Back downstairs, as I was checking out, the receptionist asked the proprietor, ‘Who is that woman?’

  He replied, ‘I’ve no idea, but she loves olives and speaks good Spanish.’

  I laughed, taken aback, thinking I had been conversing in Italian. I realised then that I had been on the road for so long, engaging in a babel of tongues, that I no longer knew one from another!

  The city of Selinus, today Selinunte, was founded by Greeks around 650 BC. Separated by a shallow valley, where in lusher times had flowed a river, also known as Selinus, the city was divided into two distinct parts. The name Selinus was derived from a broad-leafed wild celery (selinon) that covered the hillsides hereabouts and still grows around the locality.

  The eastern section, where I began, was situated outside the ancient city on a broad, open-faced eminence. There, three remarkable Doric temples had stood. Today, they are known as Temples E, F and G and only E, the second largest of the three, has been reconstructed. The trio of temples seen together, when all were standing, must have presented a spectacle unrivalled in antiquity. Only the Temple to Artemis at Ephesus was larger than Temple G and that by a mere five metres. In his second volume of Travels, the English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne described this immense rubble of stones as the ‘most gigantic and sublime ruins imaginable’.

  In its heyday, Selinus was hailed as rich and magnificent. Climbing around these massive solid stones, wondering at the skill of transporting each stone unit, none smaller than a family car, the nineteen kilometres’ distance from the quarry at Cave di Cusa, I could not doubt it. In its fallen state, it resembled a game, a puzzle, tossed from the heavens, of gigantic proportions, precious, dazzling as gold coinage, from a universe more sublime than any we mortals have ever looked upon. And lay incomplete, awaiting assemblage.

  In 409 BC, Hannibal, the Carthaginian general, mustered an army of Iberians out of Spain along with his own fellows from Africa, put them aboard ‘three-score-long galleys’ and provided them with 1500 transport ships to convey provisions, weapons, engines, battering rams, everything required for a plotted incursion. Crossing the African sea, the troops landed at Lilibeo (Marsala) and from there marched to Selinus, where, during a nine-day siege and sacking, 16,000 citizens were slaughtered. By any standards, that was a barbarous week and a half. Hannibal awarded the plunder to his soldiers who sailed back to Africa victorious.

  What struck me as deeply tragic about this invasion was that until that time the Greeks had sided with the Carthaginians in other local wars on the island and it seems that this attack had taken them completely by surprise. I thought back to the raised galley I had wondered at the day before. That boat would have been a Phoenician forerunner of those that Hannibal’s army had docked at Marsala.

  The sun was hot. I had lost my hat somewhere. Wild flowers perfumed the morning. Buggies and minibuses were transporting the few tourists present from the temples across the dried-up riverbed, westwards to the city site. I decided to walk it.

  Those Greek citizens who had fled the Carthaginian invasion of Selinus began to slowly drift back and there were attempts to reconstruct their fabulous metropolis, but it never regained its former glory and eventually a massive earthquake razed its monumental architecture to the ground.

  Along my promenade I found a copse clearing where I sat and ate Sicilian oranges so sweet and sticky they honey-stained my fingers. In all my travels I had found no story of Phoenician violences such as this one, no treachery such as the sacking of this city, and I wondered what genetic or circumstantial sea change had caused their descendants from Carthage to conduct themselves with such monstrous inhumanity. What shift might have taken place? Had the battle for control of the Mediterranean grown so vicious?

  At the acropolis, rising up on a distant promontory with its panoramic views over the sea, I spied several ancient olive mills and settling tanks set right in front of the area marked Sacred Punic Site. I wondered whether here the Carthaginians had buried their soldiers lost in the fray. After I had seen everything and was aching with exhaustion, I took a stroll to the fishing village of Marinella, where I sat at the waterfront in a wood-framed café and drank lemonade and ate ice cream, watching the weekenders playing with their kids and dogs on the beach. Spring, primavera, in Sicily was magical. An island of secrets, of cover-ups, a bloodied earth it might be but, at its rural heart, it was enchanting.

  Still, I failed to engage any Sicilian in a conversation about the recent past, about the organisation that continued to hold the infrastructure of the island in its grip. Everyone brushed it aside, claiming that their patch had never been tainted by the Mafia, that they and theirs had somehow been exempt. I telephoned La Signora one more time, hoping for a change of heart, but she was on answer service.

  Agrigento, a World Heritage Site thanks to its Valley of the Temples, much of which stood on a rocky scarp not in a valley, made an ideal overnight stop. The ruins were closed by the time I arrived but I wandered up the road anyway and found five policemen standing by the ticket booth, receiving keys from a sixth officer who was holding a white paper bag doling them out. They told me I could go in for half an hour if I wanted to.

  I wandered about in the gloaming light, dazzled by the looming shapes and shadows. The hotel I had chosen, a kilometre or two from the modern town but within sight of the illuminated temples, had a garden full of flowers and bushes where I sat and drank wine and listened to, not a chorus, but a full-blown orchestra of nightingales. Pindar once described this place as ‘the most beautiful of mortal cities’ and after two glasses of white wine, the warmish southern Med air with its scents and symphonic birdsong, I was close to concurring. In fact, I found this the loveliest of all mortal islands. After the light had faded, I took my car and drove into the town of Agrigento to grab a bite. Little was open but I found a decent pizzeria and afterwards wandered aimlessly in this city that had been one of the leading lights of Magna Graecia during the golden age of ancient Greece. The architecture that remained was a mix of modern bland intermingled with a few examples of Baroque. Earlier, while searching for somewhere to eat, several cars had crawled the kerbside, as well as one or two pedestrians, all males, each trying to attract my attention. I had not responded. During my post-dinner meanderings the same happened and I decided it was more prudent to return to the car. As I was crossing the square, there approached a mean-looking young bloke, face tessellated by scars, and I determinedly avoided looking his way. Only when I had fired up my engine and started to reverse was I aware that I had been hemmed in by two cars, one driven by Scarface.

  I had been having problems with the locking system on the VW since Marsala and I was suddenly panicked. I shot the gears into reverse, gunned the accelerator, executed a bizarre snake movement round both vehicles and roared off. Gloomy street lighting, lack of familiarity, one too many glasses of wine, I overshot the hotel turning and found myself ascending a steep, winding hill. I checked the mirror. At least one of the cars was directly on my heels, headlamps beaming. I felt a cold sweat break out. I had no idea where this road was leading until I landed in a grubby estate of seventies high-rises. Lines of laundry and satellite dishes its meagre decorations. I was in it before I knew it. The scene became a film chase as dustbins went flying and tomcats bolted for their lives. I skidded from one narrow lane to the next, each spilling with rubbish and looking identical. I checked the mirror. The pursuer had mysteriously vanished, but I was alone in an unlocked car on a Sicilian housing estate – swirling fears of petty mafiosi gangs – at close to midnight. As I swung the next left I found myself blocked in a cul-de-sac, stacked with dozens of spilling rubbish bags, staring at an iron-gated hydraulic something or other. With little space to manoeuvre, I reversed to the crunch of broken bottles beneath my tyres, found an exit by good fortune and began a more measured descent, eventually locating the hotel. By the time I locked myself securely within my ugly little room, I was trembling all over.

  *

 
I awoke to the Valley of the Temples glistening with rain, water gurgling over the pebbled tracks. Across the hills and dales of temples I squelched where I found broad-trunked, barrel-chested oliviers; hunchbacks and statuesque oleasters blossoming between fallen stones and lopped monuments. Some were possibly seven, maybe eight hundred years old, but once I had chanced upon the Garden of Kolymbetra, I abandoned the soaring Temples to Vulcan, Hercules, Juno and Concord and their bell-bottomed, grey-skinned groves. The garden had been a water reservoir for the ancient Greeks. Kolymbetra was, said the pretty dark-haired girl selling tickets, packets of seeds and membership to Italy’s National Trust, a Greek word meaning ‘large water tub’. The gardens were located within a fissure, a long, open-to-the-skies cleft within the valley, where a profusion of Mediterranean plants and irrigation systems had been planted and restored. Like Alice descending, I strolled within this fertile cavity for several hours and found a treasure trove of botanical legacies.

  The carob tree bears a fruit which is thought to have been the locust that John the Baptist survived on during his sojourn in the desert. It is sweet and nutritious and was a vital component in the diet of rural populations in the southern Mediterranean, including Sicily. In ancient times, its lentil-shaped seeds, nestling within the pendulous chocolate-brown, husk-hard pods, were used as a unit for measuring gold. The seed’s Arabic name, qirat, meaning bean pod, gave us the measure carat. A qirat, or a carat, of gold.