I looked it up and it said the Olympian fig is an iteration of the Brown Turkey fig. Does iteration mean it is the same as or an improved version?
I bought an Olympian fig to plant for cold hardiness and was wondering if I should get a Bown Turkey fig as well. Or is the Brown Turkey just a duplicate of the Olympian.
Thanks!
Itâs similar in some ways, but itâs a different fig.
Olympian is a bit bigger, a bit lighter colored, and in my experience not as bad of a splitter. Flavor is a bit better too.
Question had crossed my mind as well. Looking forward to responses. Randy/GA
Iâve always avoided brown turkey because I was too confused by the whole California BT / English BT thing. Supposedly one is great and the other is terrible but I donât know which is which. I know a farmer who has one he calls Turkish brown. 
Agreed. I like it better too.
I have both BT and the CA one. The CA one has not fruited to compare the taste, but the plants themselve look really different. The CA ones have leaves that look just like hands with thin fingers. I canât resist high fiving them when I walk by.
The story is no one knows the history of Olympian. Someone found it growing wild somewhere in I think Oregon or Washington.
Reading further I see âTexas Everbearingâ and âSoutheast Brown Turkeyâ figs are one in the same
More than likely it said Olympian is in the category of Brown Turkey figs.
The databases that proclaim this are based on a faulty, misleading set of category titles. It originated with persons selling fig cuttings and plants on social media.
Note also there are at least two âOlympianâ figs, one is an unknown from Olympia WA and the other originates from Italy.
I have found that âOlympianâ is less cold hardy than âEnglish Brown Turkeyâ. I grew âOlympianâ in ground (about an hour east of where it was found in Olympia, WA) and it was common for some of the branches to die each winter. Then, it would make a bunch of brebas, but about 2/3âs would drop before ripe (year after year). It tried to make main crop, but they were never able to ripen before my season ended.
âEnglish Brown Turkeyâ on the other hand does make a very similar looking fig, but Iâve found it to be more cold hardy with no notable winter damage in the years Iâve grown it. This has allowed it to quickly grow taller than my âOlympianâ ever got. It hasnât pushed as many brebas as âOlympian,â but the brebas it does push tend to hold on and actually ripen without aborting. I donât have a long enough season to get ripe main crop from it either, but it did seem to get pretty close to ripe last year which is better than âOlympianâ ever did for me.
The true name of that cultivar is Texas White.
I never liked Brown Turkey figs. In L.A. we had green figs (I think they call them white figs) and Black Mission figs. I looked down on the Brown Turkey figs in the Rustbelt that were $1.29 - $1.49 each. (I have no idea where they were grown and could only find figs, at one greengrocer.) Anyway, if the choice is no figs or Brown Turkey figsâŚI love the Brown Turkey figs!
Thanks!
So complex. Iâm glad someone recorded a little of the history.
I wonder if this is the English Brown Turkey?
Melinneal Gardner on youtube does a pretty good review of Olympian.
They are quite large⌠45-55 grams⌠very productive, in his taste test he mentions (cantaloupe, peaches, honey).
It works quite well for him in the hot humid south east.
TNHunter
There are families of figs with many varieties that are clearly very similar but not identical. In the Violette de Bordeaux family, there is VDB itself, Nero 600M, Valle Negra, Negronne, and a dozen others. In the European Brown Turkey family there is Olympian, Laradekâs, Valleiry, Bornholm, Susser Georg, Bayernfeige Violetta, Sodus, Bronze Paradiso, Corragio, Brown Naples, Texas Everbearing, etc.
An interesting question is how these families arose. My best guess â and it is only a guess â is that these varieties are siblings or maybe cousins. In other words, in the areas of the Mediterranean where the fig wasp is common, a common Common fig (female) and/or its sisters was pollinated by a common Caprifig (male) and/or its brothers, then the fruit was eaten by animals and dispersed. This is similar to the way American growers (including members of this forum) search for new and better varieties of apples, persimmons, etc. â plant 100,000 seeds and see what works!
Well we know English Brown Turkey figs landed in the State of Georgia as a colony. It was part of the plants brought in from England by Oglethorpe. So by 1733 they were here.
As a generality, when people refer to a fig as âBrown Turkeyâ without specifying any further detail, they seem to not know which one it is⌠If I understand it correctly, âEnglish Brown Turkeyâ is the original âBrown Turkeyâ, but âEnglishâ got added to the name to clarify that it is not the other varieties which got their names lost and then relabeled as âBrown Turkeyâ because thatâs a name that people remembered for dark colored figsâŚ
For starters, there is a âCalifornia Brown Turkeyâ and a âSouthern Brown Turkey,â neither of which is the âEuropeanâ variety. So that does create confusion. Next, it is almost certain that âEnglish Brown Turkeyâ is not the original Brown Turkey since there are BT variants from Sicily and Naples, not to mention Central Europe and France. In fact, âEuropean Brown Turkeyâ seems more correct than âEnglish Brown Turkeyâ as it seems very likely that the fig migrated to England through Europe. Anyway, wouldnât the original Brown Turkey have necessarily originated somewhere with the fig wasp, maybe â uh â Turkey?!?
I think the confusion really intensified when box stores started selling plain old âBrown Turkeyâ with no details.
Olympian was the first fig Iâve aquired. It has been a decent producer for me in zone 7A central PA. Had my first breba crop last year and both that and the main were delicious!
I do not fully buy that. People in the South just dropped the English part as there was no other Brown Turkey here at that time. I would also guess in the interceding nearly 300 years; the original imports had well climatized to the region in general.
Perhaps that led to the SBT moniker. I find that far more plausible then SBT is just a poor manâs Texas White of more recent times. If you pull up the oldest regional nursery catalogs; figs tend to revolve around what Oglethorpe brought.