The Hüseyin Avni Dede Plane

A tree in Istanbul has had the same downstairs neighbour for 58 years. Hüseyin Avni Dede came to sell books and antiques under this 375-year-old plane at the entrance to the Sahaflar Çarşısı, Istanbul's old book bazaar, in 1964, when he was ten years old and working alongside his poet father. He never really left, aside from a three-month gap in 1968. In 2022 Istanbul's Metropolitan Municipality made it official and renamed the tree after him, the Hüseyin Avni Dede Çınarı. The tree's own history runs darker. For generations Istanbulites remembered it as the Cellat Çınarı, the Executioner's Plane, because condemned prisoners were hanged from its branches into the 1960s and 70s, a detail that sits oddly beside a poet who has spent a lifetime selling verse under the same wood. Planted sometime in the mid-1600s, the tree has outlived the executions, the sultans, and most of the original Sahaflar booksellers who once worked around it. Dede is still there most days, technically a tenant of a plane tree older than the country it now stands in.