Large presses, thousands of fragments of jars and vast warehouses for storing production: Today, Monday, the Israeli authorities revealed the “largest” site for the production of wines of the Byzantine period, southern Israel, at the gates of the Gaza Strip. .

As part of excavations in Yavne, a growing city in southern Israel, archaeologists have discovered a large 1,500-year-old wine-producing site over the past two years.

The site does not look like a rustic vineyard, but rather a real winery, with an annual production of two million liters pressurized at the foot.

A team of archaeologists led by the Israel Antiquities Authority has discovered five presses that are about 225 meters high² For squeezing at the foot of the grapes, two huge octagonal basins for collecting pottery kilns and necessary for cooking the elongated amphora clay, which are called “Gaza jars” and in which the wine is aged.

“We were surprised to find a sophisticated factory here to produce wine in industrial quantities,” archaeologists Eli Haddad, Liat Nadav Ziv and John Seilingman, who led the excavations, said in a joint statement.

At that time, the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian territory now under the control of the Islamist movement Hamas, and the neighboring city of Ashkelon, in southern Israel, near Yavne, were famous for the quality of wine marketed in the Mediterranean basin.

These excavations have also made it possible to establish the presence of wine presses at the site dating back 2,300 years, the period when the Persian Achaemenid Empire ruled much of the Middle East and thus, according to archaeologists, to show a “continuum.” “Over several centuries of local winemaking.

The Israel Antiquities Authority confirmed Monday that the Yavne complex will be “preserved” and will be part of a future archaeological park accessible to the public.