The Oldest Plane of Bahçeköy

Istanbul's oldest living thing predates the city's Ottoman name by seven centuries. Inside a university forestry research station in Bahçeköy stands an Oriental plane that foresters estimate at somewhere between 1,300 and 1,400 years old, a trunk 4.5 metres across and hollowed out enough that, as Istanbul University academic Süleyman Çoban has put it, the wood actually feeding the tree is the thin outer cambium layer, not the vast dead core inside it. The tree has effectively been growing on a shell for longer than most European cities have existed. It stood here through the final two centuries of Byzantine rule, the 1453 conquest, and every Ottoman sultan who followed, unnoticed by any of them because it happened to sit in a patch of forest nobody built on. It only became a public fact recently, when Istanbul University foresters surveying their own research grounds realised they were standing next to the oldest tree in the city. Two more officially protected monumental trees share the same forest: an octopus-shaped plane a short walk away, and a double-trunked plane roughly half its age. None of them have a plaque you would notice from the forest road.