Rooted in the Mediterranean

To quote the famous Thucydides: “The peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge from barbarism when they learned to cultivate the olive and the vine.”

I believe this quote is very befitting for the story I’m about to tell, for it holds truth. Apart from being an olive tree myself (hence why I might favour the quote, too), I’ve been around for the past two and a half millenniums, living significantly longer than my relatives who don’t last much longer than 500 years. Therefore, I think it is fair for me to say that I’ve come to understand the nature of life, and more specifically, the nature of humanity. I’ve lived alongside them practically all my life, and I’ve crossed paths with people from all the greatest civilisations that thrived throughout the Mediterranean. So just as my kind helped form the earliest Mediterranean civilisations, I wish that the story of my life serves to unite the entirety of the Mediterranean people.

* * *

Life in Lebanon was lavish. The temperature was perfect for my family, with the sun out almost every day of the year, and the breeze from the sea cooling us down whenever we needed. I was only a tiny seed, yet my memory of the city of Tyre is still in perfect shape. Being on the mainland coast, we had a perfect view of the walled island ahead of us, seeing every boat entering and exiting from the two harbours, and the workshops and marketplaces covered in purple dyed sheets. However, the poor snails weren’t too happy about their obsession with the colour purple. Some even used to hide so as not to get turned into dye themselves.

It wasn’t long before I found myself on one of those boats, in the southern harbour. They had collected a basketful of my siblings and I, getting ready to send us to one of their trading outposts far out at sea. Naturally, we were initially in a state of panic. How far would we go? Were they taking us somewhere bitter and cold? What if we never got to see the Mediterranean Sun and Sea again, how would we survive then? Even on the journey itself, we couldn’t tell whether Mother would be forgiving or not. It wasn’t the first time we saw her unwavering power in the form of ferocious inland waves when she was angry.

Luckily, our worries couldn’t have been more wrong. The journey was quite a smooth one, with the sun accompanying us the entire way. Swallows heading to Africa occasionally stopped to rest on our boat and kept us company. Some had even been in the central Mediterranean region, which was where we were headed, telling us that the climate was practically the same as Lebanon, putting most of our worries at bay. And before we knew it, we had arrived in Malta.

Saying that the island is small is an understatement. I used to think that Cyprus was a small country, but I had never thought that a rock this size could end up being the home of half a million people today. Docking the boat, they initially left us at the principal port. While the environment was quite like that of home, the first few days on the island were not easy for me. I was left alone in this new country as most of my siblings got traded and sent to far-off human civilisations, ranging from Sicily in the North to even the Egyptians in the South. Unlike them, I wasn’t sent to some far-off country, but rather they planted me on an even smaller island within another natural port not far from the main one.

Life went smoothly from then on. My roots came to appreciate both the calcareous soils and the limestone beneath me, both of which my kind love. I was blessed with yet another beautiful view of the sea and a beach right in front of me, which I got to see more and more of as my trunk grew taller over the years. I met a variety of new birds migrating both North and South, who were kind enough to give me all sorts of updates on how my family was faring in their new homes across the waters, which were just as sunny and pleasant as the island I ended up on. And as soon as I was producing olives of my own, the Phoenicians kept me plenty company, taking good care of my fruit.

It was at this point that I came to truly understand how much these human beings valued us olive trees. They used us in such a wide variety of ways that I find it hard to comprehend. They pressed our fruit to extract our oils, which they then went on to use not just for cooking but also in lamps to light up their towns, and even in their perfumes and medicine to help them heal. Our produce was then shipped to these neighbouring civilisations found all around the Mediterranean basin where they used us in their own unique ways, whether as a form of offering to the Gods of the Greeks, or for use in anointing rituals in Rome. This was when I started to realise how a simple crop like me played such a large part in forming connections between these culturally different peoples. And that thought only made the news of war that much harder for me to process, when a honey buzzard coming from Italy perched in my shade and warned me of the incoming fleet.

It was a sight like I had never seen. The Romans ransacked the Phoenicians for all that they had, tearing down everything that they had set up along the harbours. It didn’t take them long to then move inland, also devastating their towns. I was in absolute shock. You could ask the fungi below me; the amount of distress signals my roots let off woke up the entire fungal system on my little island. And it all happened so suddenly; within days there was not one Phoenician left on the island. Had I not been stuck to the ground, I would have probably hidden in terror, because I had never seen anything as horrid as the mass slaughtering that had occurred. Not even Mother’s wrath had ever made me that scared. And the hardest part for me to comprehend was that these people killing each other were all the same species.

Now I’m not trying to say that I believe the Romans were particularly evil people, because I came to learn that most of the human civilisations that I lived alongside started fights of their own. Some I heard of from the usual migrating flocks keeping me up-to-date with affairs around the Mediterranean, while some others I was unfortunate enough to witness myself. As my life progressed on this island, Malta ended up falling under many other hands, and practically none of them came without bloodshed. There were the Arabs from North Africa, followed by the Normans coming from Sicily. There were even the French who came to occupy Malta, and after them the Brits too. And then, the innate greed and collective violence of these humans culminated in the largest war to date, World War II.

I don’t despise humans; I’ll make that clarification. Every civilisation left beautiful marks of deep culture and history wherever they went, as I could see around me, and so could my relatives all around the Med. I witnessed the construction of Malta’s current-day capital, Valletta, as practically every civilisation kept building and improving upon the peninsula in front of my island where it is found today. No, I think human beings are some of the most awe-inspiring creatures that roam this entire planet, the workings of their minds and imaginations being beauties in and of themselves. This story ends not with the downfall of humanity, but with quite the opposite.

For almost all my life, I witnessed one human group from one side of the Mediterranean fight with another side. Time and time again, they couldn’t come to terms and work alongside each other, so they opted for war. But after World War II, things changed. For the first time, people from all around the Mediterranean worked together peacefully, forming groups that pursued collective interests. It was the first time I ever witnessed the entirety of the Mediterranean Sea united.

To the reader who got this far, please note that I’m now a very old tree. My bark is barely intact, and I believe my day might soon come. But the story is not over, for it is being written till this day. The story of the Mediterranean is now in our hands and is our responsibility to write it as best as we can. We still face issues from our past, having made Mother quite angry, and the Mediterranean being one of the most potentially affected areas in the globe with climate change. And we still create new issues today that also need solving, with my very island, as one example, being at risk of being turned into yet another construction site. So we must look back at history, our past, and celebrate our achievements and how far we’ve come; but we must also learn from our mistakes. And as my wood weakens and my life comes to an end, may my broken branches act a symbol: the same symbol as they have always been for the united people of the Mediterranean Sea.