Moshav of Zippori

For our first adventure we headed west to the town of Zippori and the national park there that houses an extensive Roman/Jewish excavation. As with many of our other trips, the GPS was good, but not perfect. Part of the problem is that the English is a transliteration so the town names differ in their spelling causing great confusion for the GPS and us. But detours and missed roads are good things, they open vistas we might not otherwise see. Today’s adventure was no exception.
We turned left instead of right at one crossroads and arrived at the Moshav of Zippori, a tiny village. There we found another olive factory, a family farm and small restaurant. The pregnant proprietress graciously led us on a tour of the olive production room—one large room the size of a triple garage. There they clean the olives harvested from trees they rent from the village. Some of the trees are 400 to 800 years old and still producing wonderfully flavorful, organic olives. The olives are washed and pressed using the stone grinders you see in the photo. These are old, but not ancient, basalt rollers that although controlled electrically, operate in much the same manner grinding stones have worked for thousands of years. This is a family enterprise houses in what was once the father’s chicken coop. She recalled gathering the eggs when she was a child growing up on the farm. Her mother continues to grow many fruits and vegetables and puts up preserves, a jar of which we purchased. There are many small family businesses scattered throughout the country side, multi-generational enterprises, sometimes modernized by the younger generation, as with this olive press, and other times repeating the work as it has been done before, as we saw at the Shofar factory.
At the olive factory the family sons decided to add to the building a section that is ecologically sound. They added a large, almost cave like, adobe structure built of straw blocks encased in straw and plaster walls. The result is wonderful free form walls, with built in niches, soft to the eye but strong against the elements. Shelving is all made of olive branches and woods as are the tables and chairs. The garden appears chaotic, but there was order and abundance and pleasure evident everywhere. The proprietress was most casual, her hair unkempt and her dress casual. This is what we have come to expect in Israel, little attention to the appearance, but much attention to the character. Abby explains this by suggesting that when one’s life is always in danger, we determine what is important and what is not, and the perfect coiffure is definitely not important. Our olive oil heiress could not have been more gracious and charming if she were attired in a Prada suit. That she wasn’t allowed us to also be more comfortable with her. Our conversation was a mixture of Hebrew (Abby did her best to translate) and English. There was no effort to push us to buy anything or be anything other than there at that moment. Another glorious wrong road that was right.