The Plane Tree of Platanos Square

The taverna took its name from the tree, not the other way round. O Platanos has served under this plane at Diogenous 4 since 1932, and the small Plaka square it stands in is called Platanos, plane tree, because that is what people navigated by. In the 1920s the painters Pericles Byzantios and Pavlos Kalligas and the sculptor Fokion Rokos met in its shade; Henry Miller and Patrick Leigh Fermor both wrote about eating here. Nobody has dated the tree. Local tradition calls it centuries old and every source repeats that phrase without a number, so we are not going to invent one. What can be said is that by 1932 it was already large and distinctive enough for a business to name itself after it, which puts a floor under it: upward of a century is the honest reading, and the rest is tradition. It stands a minute north of the entrance to the Roman Agora, which is a strange thing to sit and think about, because the plane is the tree of Greek public life. It is what Socrates and Phaedrus lie under by the Ilissos in Plato's dialogue, arguing through the heat of the afternoon. This one shades a square where people still argue over lunch. The tables belong to the taverna. The square and the shade do not.