Look at the garlic, the onions, the dill, the dill they used to flavor fish especially those heavy, yellow fish soups they so loved. And this frolic ecological Byzantine delight here, there’s three or four different sorts of crops, there is rocket for salad, there is chard and cabbage again, all sorts of these mint, all growing together in a great profusion.  

 

At the end of it all, lettuce to calm your stomach. So and the peasants in the fields, they stopped there for a moment, straightened their backs to watch the lords of Byzantium, those great history makers riding by, they too could  think, well, we’re not in such a bad time either.

 

The Byzantine economy was based on the classic Mediterranean diet: wine, grain, cheese, and vegetables and olives. Olive oil was a staple. It was Byzantium’s fuel. It lit streets, and homes and lighthouses, it oiled carts and cured baldness （治愈秃头）①, and it was used for cooking.

 

In its first centuries, Constantinople’s oil came mostly from northern Syria. This is a wonderful thing. It’s a piece of Byzantine industrial archeology. It’s a factory for making olive oil. This is a marvelous little place. I’ll show you how it works, it’s very sensible very logical.

The olives were picked from the trees, they came down that little street in wagons, they were tipped down through a window, and they fell into that trough down there, they were then scooped out of the trough and put into this mill, this is a great oil press for the berries. You see this drum, there were two of those, they fitted on end in here side by side, a bar went between them, and four or five men pushed around the outside and reduced the olives to skin and the stone into a sort of horrible messy pulp. That then, was taken out of there, and laid in these circles here. Now this thing in the wall here, held a great beam that ran through the air. And hanging above this was a huge cylinder of stone and that then was slowly dropped onto the massive olive paste and the oil dripped down into these tanks. Not the end, because this, after all, although is cold pressed 冷榨, is actually a very impure oil at this moment. So they take it out of here.