The Florya Mastic Tree

Most mastic trees stay shrub sized, a couple of metres of scrubby Mediterranean green grown for their resin, not their timber. The mastic tree inside Florya's Atatürk Forest did not get that memo. Estimated at around 500 years old, its trunk has thickened to roughly 2 metres across, the thickest mastic tree recorded anywhere in Istanbul by a wide margin, a shrub species behaving like an oak. Nobody taps it for resin the way Chios islanders have farmed the same species for a thousand years; this one grows purely as a curiosity inside a public forest planted from 1936 on reclaimed coastal land that used to be marsh. Walk the forest paths near the shore and you pass pines and cedars planted deliberately as part of a young republic's afforestation project, all of them younger than the mastic tree they grew up around, a five-century holdout that was already old when the rest of Florya was still open water.