The Regrown Olive of Plato's AcademyYoung regrowth

A city bus ended nearly 2,400 years of continuous shade in 1976, when it struck and split the trunk of the olive tree beneath which Plato is said to have taught. The tree stood in the grove of Akademos, the suburb that gave Plato's school, and eventually the English word academy, its name, and tradition held that the sacred grove here had grown from cuttings of Athena's own tree on the Acropolis centuries before Plato ever arrived to teach beneath it. The collision didn't kill the root system, and what grows in the archaeological park today is a genuine regrowth from that same base rather than a replacement sapling brought in from a nursery, a distinction the site treats as worth preserving. It is a young tree by any measure, decades old rather than millennia, and it looks like one: slim and upright, nothing like the gnarled giants elsewhere on this list. What makes it worth the detour is what it stands on rather than what it currently looks like, the excavated foundations of the gymnasium and residence buildings where Plato, and later Aristotle as a student, actually walked. The park is free, open daily except Monday from 9am to 4pm, and considerably quieter than the Acropolis eight kilometres away.