The Old Olive Tree of Xyliatos

This olive is wider around than it is tall. Thirteen metres of trunk circumference against a height of about six, which is roughly what an olive does when it is given enough centuries: the trunk splits, hollows and fuses back on itself while the crown stays low and hard. It is held to be the largest-girth olive on Cyprus, and the oldest. How old is exactly the argument. The Xyliatos Community Council, which campaigned to have the tree protected, says about 1,700 years. A Cypriot tourism site says 800. Neither shows any working, no ring count and no growth-rate calculation, and olives are close to impossible to date anyway, because the old heartwood rots out and leaves nothing continuous to read. Both figures are received, so the honest answer is the range. What is documented is 2004, the year the Department of Forests placed the tree under protection after the council pressed for it. On the council's figure the olive was already old under Byzantine rule and would have stood through Richard the Lionheart's sale of the island in 1191, the Lusignan and Venetian centuries and three hundred years of Ottoman administration. On the tourism figure it starts around that same 1191. It grows in the open at Potima, a named spot in the village, in the foothills near the Xyliatos dam.