Costas Mathiopoulos: A Return to Kato Rizospilia
Costas Mathiopoulos spent more than twenty years working as a supplier of agricultural products to British retail chains — the kind of career that puts you on the buying and logistics side of food, seeing how products move from farm to shelf across an entire industry, but not necessarily growing anything yourself. At some point in that career, he made a different decision: to go back to his home village, Kato Rizospilia, in the Gortynia municipality of Arcadia, and introduce the world to the olive oil that had always come from that specific patch of land.
It’s worth picturing the place itself. Kato Rizospilia sits at the foot of the mountainous valleys carved by the Alfeios River, on the same historic route that once carried travelers toward ancient Olympia — a landscape with genuine mythological weight in Greek tradition, long associated with pastoral idealism, music, and a particular reverence for nature. Founding an olive oil company there in 2012 wasn’t Costas building a brand from nothing; it was a former industry insider choosing to go home and formalize what his own village’s land had always been capable of producing.
