The Olive Tree: Myth, Heritage, and a Living Symbol

Reconstruction of the west pediment of the Parthenon, Acropolis Museum

Every year on 26 November, UNESCO marks World Olive Tree Day, a relatively new observance (proclaimed in 2019) that reflects a very old reality: the olive tree has been woven into human history for millennia (UNESCO, 2019). As food, fuel, medicine, and timber, Olea europaea has shaped Mediterranean economies and landscapes; as symbol and metaphor, it has carried meanings of wisdom, peace, and endurance from antiquity to the present.

This essay blends mythological narratives, archaeological and historical evidence, and contemporary heritage practice to explore the olive tree as both a natural organism and a cultural symbol. From Athena’s mythical gift to Athens to today’s UNESCO-recognized “landscapes of olives and vines” the olive tree emerges as a living emblem of resilience, continuity, and the choices societies make between spectacle and sustainability.

Mythological Roots: Gods, Doves, and a “Blessed Tree”

The foundational myth of the olive tree in the Greco-Mediterranean imagination is the contest between Athena and Poseidon for the patronage of a new city on the ancient Greek Attic coast. In the most familiar version, Poseidon strikes the rock of the Acropolis with his trident, producing a salt spring; Athena instead offers an olive tree, promising food, oil, and wood. The Athenians choose her gift, and the city becomes Athens. Ancient authors such as Herodotus and Pausanias refer to Athena’s sacred olive tree on the Acropolis, noting that even after Persian destruction it was said to have sprouted again, a sign of the city’s resilience (Casa, 2009).

The myth is deceptively simple: two deities, two gifts, one decision. Yet symbolically it sets up a contrast between force and spectacle (the sea-god’s dramatic spring) and sustenance and wisdom (the quiet, enduring tree). The choice of the olive suggests a civic ideal: prosperity grounded in cultivation rather than conquest.

The olive’s symbolic range extends far beyond the Aegean. In the Hebrew Bible, a dove returns to Noah with “a freshly plucked olive leaf” (Genesis 8:11), signalling the end of the Flood and the possibility of renewal. The olive branch here becomes a visual shorthand for reconciliation after catastrophe, a meaning endlessly reused in later Jewish and Christian art.

In the Roman world, olive wreaths crowned victorious generals and athletes, associating the tree with victoria as well as peace. Roman agronomists such as Columella and Pliny the Elder devoted lengthy passages to olive cultivation, underscoring its economic value. Andrew Dalby’s survey of ancient food culture notes how olives and olive oil occupy a privileged place in the Greco-Roman diet and imagination, bridging the sacred, the medicinal, and the everyday (Dalby, 2003).

In Islamic tradition, the Qur’an explicitly names the olive as a “blessed tree” in the famous Verse of Light:

“Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth… [His light is] lit from a blessed tree, an olive, neither of the east nor of the west…” (Qur’an 24:35)

Cultivation, Archaeology, and Cultural Heritage

Long before these myths were written down, people were already tending olive trees. Archaeological and palaeobotanical research indicates that olive exploitation in the eastern Mediterranean began in the Neolithic and intensified in the Chalcolithic. A recent synthesis by Barazani and colleagues argues that olives were first domesticated in the southern Levant, with clear evidence for cultivation by about 5000 BCE, and that this cultivation dramatically reshaped regional landscapes (Barazani et. al. 2023).

From this eastern core, Olea europaea spread across the Mediterranean basin. Lin Foxhall’s influential monograph on olive cultivation in ancient Greece demonstrates that olive groves were central to the agrarian economies of Classical and Hellenistic Greece, requiring long-term investment, careful terracing, and complex labour regimes (Foxhall, 2007). Olive trees thus anchored not only subsistence but also social relations, inheritance patterns, and local identities.

Archaeologically, olives and olive oil surface in multiple ways:

• Charred pits and pollen in Neolithic and Bronze Age deposits testify to early exploitation and cultivation (Barazani et. al., 2023).

• Minoan Crete yields evidence for industrial-scale oil production, with storage complexes and transport amphoras indicating long-distance trade (Rackham and Moody, 1996).

• In Classical Athens, large Panathenaic amphoras filled with sacred olive oil - allegedly from trees descended from Athena's own - were given as prizes to victorious athletes, their painted surfaces juxtaposing athletic imagery with symbols of the goddess (Dalby, 2003).

Elsewhere in the European Mediterranean, literary and artistic sources from Homeric similes compare heroes to sturdy olives, and Roman wall-paintings and mosaics depict harvest scenes, highlighting how deeply the tree was embedded in everyday life. Syntheses such as Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat’s A History of Food and Dalby’s Food in the Ancient World from A to Z place the olive at the core of a broader Mediterranean food system in which oil, wine, and grain formed the classic “triad” (Toussaint-Samat, 2008).

Olive Landscapes, Tourism Branding, and UNESCO

In the 21st century, olive groves are increasingly recognised as heritage landscapes in their own right. UNESCO’s inscription of “Palestine: Land of Olives and Vines-Cultural Landscape of Southern Jerusalem, Battir” spotlights a terraced agricultural system where stone-built terraces, ancient irrigation channels, and long-lived olive trees form a cultural landscape shaped over centuries.

Elsewhere, the monumental olive groves of Apulia in southern Italy, particularly the Piana degli Ulivi Secolari between Ostuni, Fasano, Monopoli, and Carovigno, are being promoted and protected as landscapes of thousand-year-old trees, sometimes described as potential UNESCO candidates and as heritage at risk from disease and climate pressures (De Lucia, 2015).

These landscapes intersect directly with tourism campaigns and heritage branding:

• The Greek National Tourism Organization’s slogan “All you want is Greece” (2021) explicitly markets beaches, antiquities, gastronomy, and rural experiences within which olive oil and grove landscapes quietly function as key visual motifs.

• Italy’s controversial “Italia. Open to Meraviglia” campaign plays with Renaissance art (Botticelli’s Venus) and contemporary digital culture; although not exclusively about olives, its visual language often situates Venus in agrarian and gastronomic scenes that rely on the familiar aesthetics of vineyards and olive groves.

• In Spain, “olive routes” in provinces such as Jaén and Cordoba, supported by oleotourısm research and initiatives, invite visitors to experience mills, tastings, and agricultural landscapes as integrated cultural products.

Within this context, UNESCO’s World Olive Tree Day explicitly links heritage, dialogue, and sustainable development. The official documents emphasise the olive tree and branch as global symbols of peace, wisdom, and harmony, pushing the need to safeguard traditional knowledge and biodiversity in olive-growing regions.

Modern Symbolism: Resilience, Peace, and Sustainability

If the ancient myths framed a choice between spectacle and sustenance, the olive tree today has become a living metaphor for resilience in the face of environmental and political pressures.

Ecologically, olive trees are emblematic of the Mediterranean climate regime: drought-tolerant, long-lived, and capable of thriving in marginal soils. Climate and palaeo-environmental studies on recurrent droughts in the Near East and eastern Mediterranean over the last 9000 years show how societies repeatedly adapted their agricultural systems (including olive cultivation) to fluctuating water availability. In this light, centuries-old olive trees become archives of human-environment interaction, witnesses to both climatic stress and adaptive resilience.

Culturally, the olive tree continues to carry charged political and emotional meaning. In the Palestinian context, for instance, olive groves represent deep-rooted ties to land and livelihood; their destruction in the context of conflict resonates as both material loss and symbolic uprooting. UNESCO’s focus on landscapes like Battir’s “land of olives and vines” can thus be read as an attempt to protect not only terraces and trees, but also fragile lifeworlds and identities.

At the same time, the olive continues to function as a universal emblem of peace. The olive branches that frame the emblem of the United Nations deliberately draw on classical and Biblical symbolism to frame the post-1945 international order in terms of reconciliation, diplomacy, and global governance.

Finally, in contemporary debates around sustainability, olive cultivation is often invoked as a model - albeit an imperfect one - of long-term, low-input agroforestry. Landscapes of ancient trees, dry-stone terraces, and smallholder groves embody forms of environmental knowledge that scholars argue are crucial for thinking about climate adaptation, soil conservation, and biodiversity. Studies on olive resilience and Mediterranean land use repeatedly highlight the need to protect both the trees and the social practices that sustain them (Barazani et al, 2023).

A Timeless Emblem of Human Civilization

From Athena’s mythical planting on the Acropolis to UNESCO’s World Olive Tree Day, the olive tree has remained remarkably constant in its symbolic load, even as the worlds around it have changed. It is at once:

• A mythic gift that encodes choices about what kind of city, and what kind of society, humans wish to build;

• A heritage crop, archaeologically visible in charred pits, amphoras, and terraces, and historically central to economies and cuisines;

• A modern icon, mobilised on national tourism posters, inscribed in World Heritage landscapes, and invoked in debates about peace, identity, and sustainability.

To walk through an ancient olive grove in Andalusia, Lesvos, Crete, or Apulia is therefore not simply to enter a rural scene. It steps into a palimpsest where myth, memory, labour, and ecology overlap; where a tree is simultaneously organism, monument, and metaphor.

In this sense, the olive tree is more than a survivor from antiquity. It is a living symbol of how human communities choose to inhabit their environments whether they privilege spectacle or sustenance, exploitation or stewardship, conflict or peace.

References

Barazani, O., A. Dag, and Z. Dunseth. 2023. “The History of Olive Cultivation in the Southern Levant.” Frontiers in Plant Science 14:1131557.

Casa, Gianluca. “Lin Foxhall, Olive Cultivation in Ancient Greece: Seeking the Ancient Economy. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 320 Pp., 82 Illustr., Hbk, ISBN 978 0 19 8152880).” European Journal of Archaeology 12, no. 1–3 (2009): 260–62.

Dalby, A. 2003. Food in the Ancient World from A to Z. London:Routledge.

De Lucia, Alfonso. 2015. “Proposal to Include Apulia’s ‘Plain of Olive Trees’ on UNESCO List.” Olive Oil Times, February 25. Retrieved 25 November 2025 from https://www.oliveoiltimes.com/world/apulia-piana-degli-ulivi-unesco-list/46594.

Foxhall, L. 2007. Olive Cultivation in Ancient Greece: Seeking the Ancient Economy. Oxford:  Oxford University Press.

Rackham, O., and J. Moody. 1996. The Making of the Cretan Landscape. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Toussaint-Samat, M. 2009. A History of Food. 2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

UNESCO. 2019 “World Olive Tree Day: 26 November.” 206 EX/41 and related documents of the 40th session of the General Conference.

UNESCO World Heritage Centre. “Palestine: Land of Olives and Vines -Cultural Landscape of Southern Jerusalem, Battir.” Inscribed 2014.

Greek National Tourism Organization. 2021. “All You Want Is Greece’ campaign (Visit Greece / GNTO). Retrieved 25 November 2025 from https://www.greece-is.com/news/all-you-want-is-greece-gnto-2021-tourism-campaign/.

Italian Ministry of Tourism & ENIT. 2023. “Italia. Open to Meraviglia” campaign.

Classical sources cited in the text are all standard, widely available editions and are not repeated here.