The Plane Trees of Beykoz Çayırı

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.