Passion Fruit, The Known History

Although we can all agree that this amazing fruit has been around and enjoyed for thousands of years by both humans and animals it didn't make the books until 1553 when Cieza de Leon a civil servant in Colombia (Ulmar and MacDougal 2004) made the first European report. He called the fruit "granadilla" (small pomegranates) (small pomegranates), which was potentially Passiflora ligularis. In 1569, Nicolas Monardes, a physician in Spain, associated the passion flower morphology with the crucifixion of Christ. Subsequently, the passion fruit flower was used by early missionaries in Brazil as an illustrative aid in an effort to convert the indigenous population to Christianity. Specifically, it was referred to as the "flower of the five wounds" to represent Christ's crucifixion. The symbolism endured such that Carl Linnaeus established the scientific name of the genus Passiflora (Latin for passion flower) in 1737 (Kugler and King 2004).