The Blessed Tree

I had a lot of misgivings when I started reading Julie Angus’s Olive Odyssey: Searching for the Secrets of the Fruit That Seduced the World. The set-up seemed too much like a reality show: couple with ten-month-old baby sails the Mediterranean coast. The claim that Angus had visited “perhaps the oldest olive tree in the world, on Crete,” highlighted in the blurb, also made me extremely uneasy. However, the book won me over. My native country, Bulgaria, is not on the Mediterranean, but its cuisine is deeply influenced by Mediterranean cooking, and olives, as well as olive oil from Greece, are a staple. My love of these foods heightened my enjoyment of the book. Olive Odyssey has many strengths: its contribution to scientific and historical research on olives, good food and travel writing, a sense of humour and an eye for detail, and a sense of adventure and exploration.