Pillar 01 · History & Heritage

The Olive Heritage: How Żejtun Got Its Name

The town’s oldest piece of heritage is the word for it. Żejtun traces back through Maltese to the Arabic zaytūn — olive — and the olive economy that produced the name shaped the south of Malta for two millennia.

This article is a stub. We’re building it out alongside a separate piece on where to actually buy olive oil from Żejtun today.

The name and the landscape

The olive (Olea europaea) has been cultivated in the Mediterranean for at least six thousand years, and there is good archaeological evidence for olive-oil production in Malta from the Punic period onward. The Romans systematised it: the Żejtun villa, with its torcularium and storage cisterns, is one of the best-preserved Maltese examples of an olive-press operation. When Arab settlers arrived in the 9th century, the olive economy was already a thousand years old; their contribution was the place-name. Zaytūn entered Maltese as żebbuġa (the fruit) and survives in dozens of place-names across the islands. Żejtun is the largest of them.

Olive cultivation in Malta declined sharply in the 19th and 20th centuries as cotton, then citrus, then cash crops took over. In the last twenty years a small revival has begun: traditional Maltese cultivars replanted on terraces around the south, oil pressed locally in the autumn, and a handful of families putting their names back onto bottles. [LOCAL FACT — Mattew to confirm which growers and pressers are currently active around Żejtun.]

What an autumn press looks like

The autumn press is the moment the olive year resolves itself. Olives picked in October and early November are taken to a small number of working presses — some traditional, some modern — and the oil that emerges is unfiltered, intensely green, and often peppery enough to make first-time tasters cough. This is the oil at its best. By the time it has rested through the winter and lost some of that first-press fire, it has settled into the more rounded oil that goes into bottles for sale. A handful of growers around Żejtun open their presses to small visitor groups during the harvest; if you can time a visit for late October, do.

What this article will cover

  • The etymology of Żejtun and related Maltese place-names
  • Olive farming in Roman, Arab, and medieval Malta
  • Why the olive economy declined — and what replaced it
  • The modern revival: cultivars, growers, and the autumn press
  • Tasting notes for Maltese olive oil and what to pair it with

Read more on this pillar

Part of our History & Heritage pillar. Read with the Roman villa, where to buy olive oil from Żejtun, and the history timeline.

Mattew Cassar

Resident · Writer

Mattew writes zejtun.com from a flat above his grandfather’s old workshop on Triq San Girgor. He has lived in Żejtun for twenty-three of his thirty-one years.