The Ehrami Servi of Büyükada

The only tree on this list that requires a ferry to reach stands on a residential street on Büyükada, the largest of Istanbul's car-free Princes' Islands. Istanbul's official monument tree registry lists this Mediterranean cypress, grown into the tall narrow pyramidal form the species is known for, at approximately 244 years old, 18 metres tall, with a trunk 75 centimetres across. It predates the island's Belle Epoque mansions, the Greek Orthodox monastery on the hill above it, and the horse-drawn carriages that until recently were the island's only form of wheeled transport. The registry protects it under three separate criteria at once, historical importance, age, and trunk diameter, a bureaucratic way of saying there was no single reason to save it, there were three. Büyükada's own history runs through Byzantine exile, this is where empresses and princes were once banished, and through White Russian refugees fleeing the 1917 revolution, none of which this cypress witnessed directly from its residential street, but which shaped an island growing quietly taller around it for two and a half centuries.