What is the oldest tree in Cyprus?
The oldest tree on this Cyprus list is the old olive at Potima in Xyliatos, in the Nicosia district foothills, and its age is unsettled: sources give it as anywhere from 800 to 1,700 years. The Xyliatos Community Council, which had it placed under Department of Forests protection in 2004, says about 1,700 years; a Cypriot tourism site says 800. Neither figure comes from a ring count, and the same is true of every age on this page. What is measured is the trunk: thirteen metres round, the largest recorded girth of any olive on the island.
Nobody has counted a ring on any of these four trees. Every age here is a received figure passed between village councils, tourism pages and a postage stamp, and where two sources disagree the gap is wide: 800 years against 1,700 for the Xyliatos olive, a thousand years against a few centuries for the laurel at Pente Litharia, 800 against 1,200 for the plane at Ayia Mavri. Olives are the hardest of all to date, because the old heartwood rots out and the trunk splits into separate living strips, leaving nothing continuous to count. What can be measured is girth, and the Xyliatos olive's thirteen metres is the largest recorded on the island, which is the practical reason it holds the title. The Cyprus Department of Forests placed both that olive and the Ayia Mavri plane under protection in 2004. The oak at Kalopanagiotis and the laurel at Pente Litharia carry the better stories, one said to have hidden a chapel from raiders and the other said to be left over from a shrine to Apollo, but neither has an age anyone has tested. If you have a tape measure and a spare afternoon, tell us.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.