The Topkapı Palace Courtyard Plane

Istanbul's most famous plane tree has been dead for about a century. The Janissaries' plane in Topkapı's First Courtyard, the one said to have witnessed the conquest of 1453, dried out somewhere between 1900 and 1930, and the story outlived the tree by a long way. This is not that tree. This is a different oriental plane, further inside the palace, and it is still alive. It stands past the Orta Kapu on the Second Courtyard side, on the ground where the Imperial Council sat for four centuries. Turkey's national monumental tree registry records it at 778 years in one reading and 783 in another, a snapshot difference rather than a real disagreement, which would put its germination in the 1240s, two hundred years before Mehmed II took the city. Take that number carefully, and here is why. The registry's free text entry for this tree is boilerplate palace history that cites a page about a yew, and its web page lists the tree as standing in Gölbaşı, a district of Ankara. The underlying data has the species, the coordinates and the district right; the narrative wrapped around it does not. So the age is the registry's claim, and no independent source confirms a figure for this individual tree. It sits inside the ticketed palace grounds, so reaching it costs a museum entry, and the pin is courtyard level rather than exact.