This Tree Has Seen Everything
By: George Dillard
Tags: Perspective, History, Time, Greece, Trees

When the tree of Vouves was planted, stories like the Iliad and Odyssey were still being performed orally. They wouldn’t be written down for a few decades. This was partially because modern systems of writing had yet to be developed. Writing in most parts of the world was done with ideograms, stylized pictures of the things people were trying to write about. Several groups in the Middle East had begun to experiment with alphabets that represented sounds, but they were incomplete — vowels didn’t yet exist in these systems. For the next several centuries, the tree saw the slow development of Greek society.

Though Crete was not very integrated into mainstream Greek culture during the classical period, the people living nearby would have been aware of the exciting developments on the mainland. By the time of the Parthenon and Socrates, the tree was already ancient, over 400 years old. The pinnacle of ancient Greek society was brief; the golden age of art and philosophy in Athens lasted only a few decades. It was replaced by more militaristic systems — first the Spartans, then Alexander the Great’s Macedonian Empire. Neither bothered to conquer Crete, which at the time consisted of various squabbling city-states. It seems that the island, located on the trade routes between Greece, Turkey, and Egypt, became a haven for pirates during this period. Perhaps some of them snacked on olives in Vouves.

The tree would wait a few more centuries before it became part of the Roman Empire in 67 BCE. The Romans revitalized Crete; many people settled there from the mainland, and the olive oil industry prospered, no doubt with olives taken from this tree. When the empire split East and West, Crete became part of the eastern empire. When this happened, the tree was already over a millennium old.

The tree survived terrifying natural disasters. There was an earthquake on the morning of July 21, 365 CE, that may have been an 8.0 on the Richter scale. The western part of the island, where the tree resides, was devastated. The quake lifted the ground 10 meters in some places; a tsunami swamped much of the eastern Mediterranean. Almost every settlement on Crete was destroyed, but the tree kept growing. In 536, a volcanic eruption somewhere far away (maybe Indonesia, maybe Iceland, maybe Central America — scientists disagree) darkened skies all over the planet. The sun shone weakly when it could be seen at all; it was cold all the time. Crops failed all over the planet. People starved. The tree, now over 1,400 years old, kept growing.

Crete was a sleepy part of the Byzantine empire for most of the Middle Ages. Spanish Muslims invaded the island in the 800s. There was a brief period where Crete became part of the Islamic empire, but a century later —a blink of an eye for the tree — Christian rule was reestablished. Crete was under Byzantine control when the tree quietly celebrated its 2,000th birthday around the year 1100.

The Venetians took charge of Crete by the 1200s, and they connected the island to their advanced trading empire. Venetian rule led to a period of art and culture on the island; a local boy became one of the age’s renowned painters. He would be nicknamed “El Greco.”

Then the Ottomans came and took control of Crete in the 1600s, right around the tree’s 2,500th birthday. They ruled for a few hundred years until the people of Crete rose up and overthrew them. Crete was independent for a bit and then was absorbed into Greece. A few decades later, Nazi paratroopers floated down from the sky above the tree to turn the island into “Fortress Crete.” The tree persisted.

In the last one hundred years of its life — only three percent of its time so far upon the Earth — the tree has witnessed profound change. It began its life when iron was a cutting-edge technology; airplanes now soar overhead. The tree was planted by one of the 75 million humans on the Earth in 900 BCE. There are 93 times as many people on the planet as there were when the tree first sprouted. Tens of billions of humans have come and gone while the tree has quietly grown.

The tree has dealt with changes in the environment lately. It’s warmer now than it has ever been in the tree’s lifetime. And there are microplastics in the air and soil on which the tree relies. This plastic will be around for a long time — hundreds of years! — but it probably won’t last as long as the tree has.

The olive tree of Vouves has seen it all. While the world has changed around it, the tree has grown silently, bearing fruit each year. The ancient graveyard of which it was once a part has become an archaeological curiosity; the people buried there have long been forgotten. Most olive trees live only 500 years or so. We don’t know how much longer this one has left. But it’s a pretty good bet that the Vouves tree will still be there, quietly growing, when you and I pass from the Earth.