Slopes, not fields.

Everything Thymelia sells starts on the limestone slopes of the Lefka Ori — the White Mountains of western Crete — where wild thyme flowers for six weeks a year and nothing is planted, irrigated or farmed. This page explains how we buy, and it will name every producer we work with.

The buying policy

• Whole single-apiary harvests. We buy an apiary’s extraction outright — never pooled stock from a co-operative tank. One batch is one apiary, one extraction day, one certificate.
• Named producers. Every batch page names its apiary and plots its coordinates — the same ones printed on the jar. Producers are credited, not hidden behind a brand.
• Original photography only. Photographs on this site will come from our own visits to the apiaries — never stock imagery. Until we have them, you get honest drawings.
• Process limits in the contract. Cold extraction, no heating above hive temperature, no blending, no filtration beyond coarse straining — written into the purchase, then verified by the batch tests.

Where we stand today

We are selecting partner apiaries now — visiting producers in the Chania region, tasting, and asking for numbers: extraction temperatures, moisture, HMF and diastase per batch. The producers we sign will be named here at bottling, with the first batch records. We publish this page before the contracts precisely so you can compare what we promised with what we deliver.

The harvest year