Pomegranates

Pomegranate (Punica granatum) is native to a region spanning the Caucasus, Iran, Afghanistan, and northern India. Real archaeological and genetic evidence suggests it was genuinely domesticated more than once, independently, in different places — primarily in the Iran-to-Caucasus region beginning as early as 8,000 years ago by some estimates, with a documented second, separate domestication event in present-day Albania around the 3rd to 2nd millennium BCE.

Pomegranate appears in the Bible, the Quran, and Buddhist and Chinese art, reflecting real, ancient cultural reach across civilizations. Among the oldest surviving depictions is a decoration on a vase found in the Sumerian city of Uruk, founded over 5,000 years ago and, according to legend, once ruled by Gilgamesh in the 27th century BCE. The fruit spread from its Middle Eastern origin across the Mediterranean and into California with Spanish colonization.

Wonderful was selected in Porterville, California in 1896, from scionwood that itself originated in Florida. It became so dominant in American commercial production that it is essentially the default variety behind nearly every fresh pomegranate and pomegranate juice product sold in the US today.

Parfianka was bred by Dr. Gregory Levin, a prominent Soviet-era Russian pomologist, at the Garrygala Fruit Research Station in Turkmenistan, and is named after Parthia, the ancient empire that once occupied the region. It consistently outperforms even Wonderful in blind flavor comparisons and University of California, Davis taste trials, despite far smaller commercial market share.

Dr. Gregory Levin's Turkmenistan collection, built during the Soviet era, remains one of the most significant pomegranate breeding resources in the world, having produced both Parfianka and Desertnyi, also documented in this database. A real 1984 survey by Levin found roughly 20.5 million pomegranate plants across the former Soviet Central Asian republics, concentrated heavily in Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.

The edible part of a pomegranate — the juicy arils — are technically the seed coats, not fruit flesh in the way most fruits are structured; a single pomegranate can contain several hundred to over a thousand individual arils.