The Alpheios: A River That Runs Through Our Family
One of the things I love doing when exploring Greece is tasting the local foods and delicacies and discovering the places they come from and the people behind them. So last summer when we were in the Astritsi region of Crete - famed for producing some of Greece’s most delicious wines - I couldn’t pass up on the opportunity to visit one of the vineyards and the people responsible for making them.
Lyrarakis is a beautiful, family-run vineyard, and we were lucky enough to be shown around the estate by a member of the family - something that always changes the feel of a place. You’re not just learning about a product; you’re being told a story that belongs to someone.
Like many vineyards in that part of Crete, Lyrarakis was originally established to follow classical French winemaking practices. And although a lot has changed in the last century or so (and they are decidedly more Greek in their outlook than they maybe once were), that French influence still shows - not just in technique, but in language. As we walked through the vines, we heard familiar French terms being used to describe the wines, the land, and the process. And one word in particular stayed with me: terroir.
Terroir is a French term most commonly associated with wine but can refer to all sorts of food products. It's the idea that flavour is shaped by place - the soil, the water, the climate, the altitude, the surrounding landscape, and the way generations of people have worked and understood that land. Terroir is what makes one vineyard’s wine unmistakably itself, even when the grape variety is the same.
As a concept, it felt immediately familiar - deeply Greek, even. But, as far as I know, there isn’t an exact Greek equivalent for the word. If I had to choose the closest translation, it would probably be τόπος (Tópos). The word simply means place, but in Greek it carries much more than geography.
Tópos is about belonging, identity, and inheritance. It’s about the relationship between land and people, and the way that relationship shapes character — in both. And this is something my own family has always understood the importance of when producing their olive oil.
My family’s olive grove sits in the village of Epitalio in the Peloponnese, a place I have visited every year of my life since I was a baby. Many of my relatives still live there, and the rhythms of village life - the heat, the dust, the conversations, the food — feel as familiar to me as home. And part of that rhythm is the Alpheios river which runs through both the village and through my earliest memories of Greece.
When you’re walking around the village you might not always notice the river, but it's presence is always there. It feeds the land around the village, including our family’s olive grove — the same grove that still produces the olives used to make our Zoubaki Extra Virgin Olive Oil today. The land that sustains those trees is fed by the Alpheios - and it's a river that is so old and significant that my grandmother used to tell me it was mentioned by Homer himself in the Iliad (it is - I've checked!) I remember being quietly awed by that idea — that the same river I could see, touch, and walk alongside had flowed through poetry written nearly three thousand years ago.
Only later did I learn that its story stretches back even further.
The Alpheios is not just a river of history, but of myth. In ancient Greek mythology, it is personified as the river god Alpheus, who fell deeply in love with the nymph Arethusa. According to the myth, Arethusa fled from Alpheus across land and sea, eventually transforming into a freshwater spring on the island of Ortygia in Sicily — only for Alpheus, impossibly, to flow beneath the sea to reunite with her.
It is a story about devotion and persistence, but also about connection — about waters that refuse to be separated, even by distance. Reading it properly for the first time as an adult, I was unexpectedly moved. Perhaps because, like so many Greek myths, it speaks in metaphor about things we still feel: belonging, longing, continuity.
Standing by the river in Epitalio now, I often think about how many layers of meaning run through it. Myth. Poetry. Agriculture. Family. The Alpheios nourished ancient Olympia before it nourished our olive trees. It carried stories long before it carried irrigation water. And yet, it still quietly does its work, season after season, feeding the land that feeds us.
For me, this is what Greek heritage really is — not something preserved behind glass, but something living. A river that links my grandmother’s stories to Homer, mythology to agriculture, and ancient landscapes to the crafts and produce we still make today, including my family’s olive oil.
The Alpheios doesn’t just run through Epitalio.
It runs through our family history.