The Dudul din Batiștei (White Mulberry of Batiștei)

According to a story carved onto a plaque in its own church porch, a boy named Manciu once told Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu that the mulberry tree he had just been scolded for climbing would outlive the prince himself. It did, by a very wide margin. Brâncoveanu was executed by the Ottomans in 1714, and the white mulberry in the courtyard of Batiștei Church is still standing, now generally reckoned Bucharest's oldest living tree, though estimates for exactly how old split between a documented 200-plus years and a traditional claim, tied to the Brâncoveanu legend, of over 300. Either figure makes it older than the church building around it in its current form, and older than the surrounding streets, which grew up around the tree rather than the other way round, back when this stretch of the city was a mahala, a merchants' and craftsmen's quarter where local children apparently used the tree as a climbing frame long before anyone thought to protect it. It carries official status as an arbore ocrotit, a protected tree, one of a small number in the capital with that designation and a documented legend to go with it rather than just a girth measurement.