Heading north from Izmir towards Çanakkale, we came to the Adatepe Olive Oil Museum, in Küçükkuyu. Again, we were the sole visitors at a very interesting site.

The museum is a restored soap factory designed to display artifacts related to olive culture. It’s the only one in Turkey devoted to the history of olive oil production. The museum extracts oil by traditional cold-press methods in its factory and stores the oil for families in the area.

We saw huge granite mills for grinding olives, various tools for pruning and olive picking, baskets for carrying olives, and earthenware jars for olive oil storage.

There are also amphoras from sunken ships of early Mediterranean trade (which never made it to the Bodrum symposium). There are displays of various tools for making olive oil soap, charts of the annual cycle of olive production, maps showing the spread of olives from Syria westward, and writings in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sacred texts.