The company ‘Anatoli’ SA (ABEA)

The company ‘Anatoli’ SA, known as ABEA, was the first and largest olive oil processing plant in Greece. It was founded in 1889 by the French chemist Jules Deiss in Nea Chora, next to the Jewish cemetery and, compared to the island’s standards at the time, it was particularly innovative both from a financial and a technological standpoint.

ABEA’s ownership was transferred to local Chania businessmen in 1916. It employed numerous workers during the interwar period, several of them from Nea Chora, both natives and refugees. According to a former employee of the company, Asia Minor refugees were hired preferentially because it was thought that ‘they knew how to bake and cut the soap, it was tradition for them, an oriental craft’. Similarly, it was women who were hired as seasonal workers to operate the hand press which sealed the individual soap bars, particularly Jewish women, until they were displaced in 1944.

Due to Nea Chora’s dense residential development and the rise of new environmental approaches to residential space, it eventually became imperative that the ABEA industrial facilities move away from the neighbourhood. In 1994, the olive oil processing plant and the soap making plant were moved to the south of the city, followed by the bottling plant and the company’s administrative offices in 2004.  

A large part of the old facilities was destroyed. Thanks to the residents’ efforts, who demanded that part of the land be granted for the construction of much needed educational facilities, the site now hosts the 1st High School and the 5th Secondary School of Chania. All that’s left of the ABEA old facilities is one building and two chimney stacks which were deemed worthy of preservation in 2018.

Map