The Taban Mulberry

Popular legend says Ottoman occupiers planted this mulberry during their century and a half ruling Buda, which would make it well over 400 years old; the more carefully sourced version, and the one this project follows, credits Empress Maria Theresa's 18th-century push to build a domestic silk industry, which put mulberry orchards across Taban specifically to feed silkworms, with a 1771 report confirming mulberries already growing in the district by then. Either story would make it one of the oldest trees in Budapest; historians settle on 200 to 250 years as the defensible range, though some push it as high as 300. It once grew inside the yard of a house whose fence has long since vanished, its canopy spilling toward what was then the top of the Komuves lepcso, a stone staircase since rebuilt slightly further along the hillside than its original route. By 2021 the tree was in poor enough condition that Budapest's parks authority began active conservation work to save it, propping and pruning rather than letting a specimen this rare simply fail. A sign on today's Taban Botanical Trail warns visitors not to climb its branches, a small, practical reminder that a centuries-old story is still standing on a genuinely fragile trunk.