The Plane of Vračar

A restaurant grew up around this plane tree, not the other way round. When Milan Trandafilović opened his kafana beside Kalenić market around 1890, he built it facing the crossroads where five streets converge, choosing the spot because a plane tree already stood there large enough to shade an outdoor terrace. Restaurant and tree have shared the corner ever since, run under his family's name for well over a century, the terrace still sitting in the tree's shadow today. Belgrade's own park management, Zelenilo-Beograd, puts the tree at roughly 170 years old, its trunk 3.9 metres round and its crown 27 metres tall, rising clear of the apartment block behind it. The Belgrade City Assembly declared it a natural monument in 2002, protecting a plot of pavement barely bigger than the restaurant garden it shades. Vračar's traffic has grown in tight around it since. Five roads meet within sight of the trunk and a parking sign stands almost against the bark, the tree's widest limbs stretching out over passing cars rather than open ground. It needed no palace and no prince to earn its protection, just a nineteenth-century tavern keeper's instinct that a good tree was worth building next to.