The Traditional Olive Oil Mill – Charakopio

Not many people know that Charakopio has a museum! It’s actually a traditional olive oil press dating back to the 1870’s. The building was restored several years ago and members of the village community group I belong to have been working away in there for a while, getting it ready for the public. We still need to add captions and get the signposts up around the village.

To publicise the building’s existence, a couple of exhibitions were held in there over the summer, when the village was bustling with visiting Athenians. The first exhibition was a ceramics exhibition showing work of the students of a local potter. The second was a rather impromptu exhibition of local sketches by yours truly. I was joined by a couple of artist friends, who graciously allowed me to borrow their sketchbooks for the occasion. We must have had around sixty sketchbooks in there, plus a few local paintings. The local art went rather nicely in the stone building, casually displayed amid the old olive press machinery and several visitors remarked the press made a nice exhibition venue for the village. Visitors could also hear about the history of the building and see how various stages of the olive oil production process worked way back then.

If you’re in the area and would like to visit the Charakopio museum, the key can be borrowed from Fouli in the taverna – the museum is just a few metres up the road on the left from there.