Seasons1 of 4
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.
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Getting there
Sahaflar Çarşısı entrance, Beyazıt Meydanı, Fatih
You can recognise it by the second-hand booksellers' stalls set up beneath its canopy every day. It stands at the entrance to the Sahaflar Çarşısı book bazaar on Beyazıt Meydanı.
Free, open bazaar entrance
2 min walk from Beyazıt-Kapalıçarşı tram stop (T1 line)
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.
