The Ata Fıstık Çamı

The tree that gave a hill its name is not originally from this hill. Küçük Çamlıca, Istanbul's best known viewpoint on the Asian side, takes its name from the stone pines (çam) covering it, but foresters say the grove's own symbol tree, the Ata Fıstık Çamı, was brought here from the Aegean region generations ago and adapted to Bosphorus soil rather than growing here naturally. At roughly 397 years old, with a trunk 145 centimetres across and a crown reaching 25 metres, it predates the name Çamlıca itself, which only stuck once Sultan Abdülaziz began favouring the grove in the nineteenth century. Stone pines are usually grown for their edible pine nuts, and this one has produced them for longer than Istanbul has had streetlights, trams, or bridges across the Bosphorus. Istanbul's official monument tree registry lists it, and half a dozen younger pines around it, as individually protected, each with its own name and measured age, a small forest of transplants that outlived the reason anyone brought them here in the first place. The view from the hill gets the visitors. The tree that named the hill mostly gets ignored.