Köstem Organik Zeytin Çiftliği

The mill, told properly

Köstem Organik Zeytin Çiftliği was established by Levent and Güler Köstem in 2004, in what the farm's own account gives as the village of Nohutalan at Urla, İzmir, on ground the same page places in the path of the winds coming off Çeşme's Ildır bay and Urla's Zeytineli bay. The account hands the story to Dr. Levent Köstem, who describes touring working mills while assembling the collections for an olive oil museum, finding how much of the country's oil was made and stored in poor conditions, travelling to Spain, and then seeing the mill on the Rosenberg family's olive farm at Datça still spotless the morning after a night of pressing — after which, he writes, his sole aim was a mill as hygienic as an operating theatre. The plant was laid out so that pressing, storage and bottling each hold their own workflow; the storage room was built insulated against temperature swings; washing and crushing were sited apart from the malaxer and decanter; and the pressing areas were closed to everyone but the technicians on duty. The farm states that olives reach the mill within four hours of picking at most, that every oil pressed there goes through its own laboratory, and that it is graded on its chemical characteristics into one- and two-tonne tanks rather than large ones.

The farm's shop lists its oils by variety, among them Memecik, Erkence, Tirilye and Yamalak Sarısı alongside the Sicilian Tonda Iblea, and sells them beside the estate's other produce. No certifying body is named on the pages the farm publishes.

The family's museum stands on the same estate. Its own about page records that the museum was planned from 2002 together with Ali Ertan İplikçi, that materials and collections were gathered over the years that followed, and that the Köstem Kültür, Eğitim ve Müzecilik Vakfı was set up so the museum would outlast its founders; the page sets the aim as holding, at one-to-one scale, every olive-crushing system used in Turkey to date, and describes the result as a technology museum, the country's second industrial museum after the Koç museum. It gives 20,000 square metres of total area with 5,650 square metres enclosed, more than 500 trees planted in the front garden on an arboretum principle, and a collection of Aegean and wider Anatolian olive varieties in the back garden. Visit İzmir, the İzmir Metropolitan Municipality's city guide, records the museum as open since November 2017 at Uzunkuyu village, Urla, and repeats those area figures. Its separate entry for the Klazomenai olive oil installation at Urla dates the installation to the 6th century BC, records it as found during the 2004–2005 excavations and as the oldest known olive oil installation in Anatolia, and credits its return to working order to a project carried out by Prof. Dr. Güven Bakır and Ertan İplikçi.

From the public record: dukkan.kostemciftligi.com · kzmurla.com · visitizmir.org