The Evergreen Plane of Gortyn

Every other oriental plane on Crete is bare in January. This one is not. The tree at Gortyn is Platanus orientalis var. cretica, an evergreen form of a deciduous species, reported from perhaps fifty places on the island and from almost nowhere else, and it holds its leaves straight through the winter. That is the reason to walk to the back of the archaeological site, and it is a better reason than the one the guidebooks give. The guidebook reason is Europa. Gortyn is where Zeus, in the shape of a bull, is said to have carried her, and their union under a plane tree is stamped on the city's own ancient coins. That story belongs to the place and not to this trunk, and nothing connects the two. Read the coins as evidence of how long people here have associated the site with a plane tree, which is genuinely interesting, and not as a birth certificate for the one growing there now. Nobody has dated it, and there is a botanical reason why nobody easily could. Planes regenerate from the root, so what looks eternal can be a succession of new stems on an old base, and the sources describing this one note that in its present form it is relatively small. It is protected, it is evergreen, and its age is an open question. If you know more, tell us.