Olive Auction built this page from public records so buyers can find the estate. Its own people can claim it at no cost — complete the story, list lots, answer buyers.
After a claim, we confirm by emailEverything here comes from public sources — award lists, certification registers, the territory inventories. The rest of the story — the family, the grove, the real age of the trees, this year's lab sheet — only the mill can tell, and it is the part buyers bid on.
Ata Ağaç began with a photography outing. In November 2016, after marrying Selçuk Aktürk, a physics lecturer in the science faculty at Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University, Hatice Aktürk was scouting the ground between the ruins of Miletos and Iasos when very old olive trees caught their attention, and the couple bought a ten-dönüm grove inside the Milas district. The producer puts the ages of trees in that grove at anywhere between 100 and 3,500 years. One of them, the tree the brand is named for, measures about 12.5 metres around at ground level and roughly four metres across.
Because the tree is alive and still fruiting, ring counting and radiocarbon were both unsuitable, so Ankara University's Institute of Nuclear Sciences cored the root zone, took soil from seven points beneath it and used luminescence to date the last time those sediments saw daylight. The laboratory's finding was that the tree had been planted around 3,000 years ago; the method and result were published in the Journal of Quaternary Science on 26 May 2020. The Milas Chamber of Commerce and Industry later certified Ata Ağaç as the second olive oil brand it had cleared to carry the EU geographical indication.
Hatice Aktürk, who spent a decade selling textiles into the British market before returning to Muğla, presses organic early-harvest oil and runs a line of olive-leaf and olive-oil skincare numbered from 3201 upward, after the age the brand credits to the tree. The Ata Ağaç harvest is taken at a public ceremony each autumn in aid of local schools.
From the public record: ataagac.com
A producer account takes a minute — name, mill, region. We attach this profile the same day.
Lab numbers, tree references, harvest dates, a photo — the tap-through form asks only for what buyers pay for.
Auction with a confidential reserve, or a fixed-price allocation. We review it and it goes live.
The catalogue goes to this list before it goes on the site. When the sale closes you get every hammer price from it — including the ones that disappointed.
Two emails. Then quiet until Sale No. 2.
