Seasons1 of 4
Ottoman sultans hunted on this exact meadow, which is why locals still sometimes call it Hünkar Çayırı, the Sultan's Meadow, instead of its official name. A handful of plane trees standing on Beykoz Çayırı today, three or four individually protected as monumental, date to the era when Mehmed II built a hunting lodge near what is now Tokatköy after the 1453 conquest, and Istanbul University foresters estimate their average age at somewhere between 400 and 500 years, old enough that at least some may already have been standing before the lodge itself went up. Unlike a single named specimen with one clean story, these trees are witnesses in the plural: hunting parties under the Conqueror and his successors, then the meadow's slower afterlife as Beykoz shifted from imperial hunting ground to Bosphorus village. What they lack in individual fame they make up for in setting. This is one of the few spots on this list where you can stand under a centuries-old plane tree and see the Bosphorus doing exactly what it was doing when the tree was a sapling.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Beykoz Çayırı, Ortaçeşme, Beykoz
You can recognise them by the small group of broad old planes standing apart across an open meadow, the Bosphorus visible beyond. They stand on Beykoz Çayırı, the former Sultan's hunting meadow.
Bus or dolmuş from Beykoz pier; no metro access
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.