Athens burned, was besieged, and was rebuilt too many times over three millennia for medieval trees to survive here. What the city kept instead is continuity: an olive replanted where Athena is said to have grown the first one, another regrown from the roots of Plato's own Academy, and a 1950s grove now ranked among the century's landscape masterpieces. Only one true old-growth contender made the list, a disputed 2,500-year-old olive, so far never independently dated by science.
0 / 12 Athensで訪れた数
写真：George E. Koronaios (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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The Sacred Olive Tree of the Acropolis更新され続けている
Olive (Olea europaea) · 70-110 years (current wood); mythologised lineage to 480 BC · Acropolis
The olive tree beside the Erechtheion has died and returned at least twice, and both times the same legend gets the credit. Herodotus wrote that when Xerxes' Persian army burned the Acropolis in 480 BC, the sacred olive Athena was said to have grown in her contest with Poseidon went up with it, only to sprout a new shoot a cubit high the very next day. The tree standing here now is a second resurrection: German occupying forces damaged the earlier specimen during the Second World War, and sources disagree on exactly when its replacement went in, some say 1917, before that war even started, others say 1952, after it. What both agree on is the point of the story rather than the paperwork: someone has kept an olive growing on this exact spot for as long as Athens has kept records, using cuttings from the previous tree rather than starting over with something unrelated. The Erechtheion behind it, an asymmetrical marble temple finished around 406 BC to house the Acropolis's holiest relics, has needed far more restoration than the tree ever has. Entry is included in the standard Acropolis ticket, and the olive stands walled into the Pandroseion, the small sanctuary against the temple's west side.
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写真：ELENITSA1976 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Olive Tree of Pisistratus
Olive (Olea europaea) · 300-2,500 years (disputed) · Agioi Anargyroi, western Athens
A tree in a pocket park behind a suburban church carries a claim that would make it older than the Parthenon: officially attested by the Hellenic Archaeological Society in 1919 at more than 2,500 years, and popularly billed since as the oldest living olive tree on Earth. Modern olive dating complicates that considerably. Olive trunks rot hollow from the inside as they age, taking the innermost, oldest rings with them, and radiocarbon studies of other headline-grabbing old Mediterranean olives have repeatedly found real ages closer to three or four hundred years once properly tested. No such study has been published for this specimen, so its 1919 figure rests on early 20th century measurement methods rather than anything a lab would confirm today. What isn't in dispute is the name behind it: Pisistratus, the 6th century BC tyrant of Athens, is credited with the wave of olive planting that turned Attica into the region's defining olive economy, and this suburb sits on what was once part of that grove. Part of the trunk was cut for firewood during the wartime occupation of the 1940s, and it grew back regardless. It is now a protected natural monument, free to visit, standing in a small park behind the church that gives the area its name.
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3
The Regrown Olive of Plato's Academy若い萌芽
Olive (Olea europaea) · under 50 years (regrowth) · Akadimia Platonos, Kolonos
A city bus ended nearly 2,400 years of continuous shade in 1976, when it struck and split the trunk of the olive tree beneath which Plato is said to have taught. The tree stood in the grove of Akademos, the suburb that gave Plato's school, and eventually the English word academy, its name, and tradition held that the sacred grove here had grown from cuttings of Athena's own tree on the Acropolis centuries before Plato ever arrived to teach beneath it. The collision didn't kill the root system, and what grows in the archaeological park today is a genuine regrowth from that same base rather than a replacement sapling brought in from a nursery, a distinction the site treats as worth preserving. It is a young tree by any measure, decades old rather than millennia, and it looks like one: slim and upright, nothing like the gnarled giants elsewhere on this list. What makes it worth the detour is what it stands on rather than what it currently looks like, the excavated foundations of the gymnasium and residence buildings where Plato, and later Aristotle as a student, actually walked. The park is free, open daily except Monday from 9am to 4pm, and considerably quieter than the Acropolis eight kilometres away.
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写真：George E. Koronaios (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4
The Transplanted Olive of Megali tou Genous Scholis
Olive (Olea europaea) · up to 1,500 years (Agricultural University of Athens assessment) · Opposite Evangelismos Hospital, near the Hilton
In December 2015, a construction crew dug up an entire mature olive tree in the village of Elaionas, in the hills above Aigio, and drove it more than 200 kilometres to a traffic island in central Athens. The tree wasn't being rescued from age or disease. It stood inside the corridor cleared for a new railway line, and Greece's rail construction authority, ERGOSE, had committed to relocating rather than felling the older olives caught in its path, part of a program that has since moved more than 500 trees out of expropriation zones since 2013. The Agricultural University of Athens assessed this particular specimen at up to fifteen centuries old before the move, old enough to have already been ancient when the Byzantine Empire ruled from Constantinople. It survived the truck journey and a complete change of soil, climate and neighbours, and now stands on a traffic island opposite Evangelismos Hospital, a few steps from the Hilton, doing exactly what it always did: producing shade and, most years, olives. Nothing about its current setting hints at the story behind it. It is easy to walk past a well-kept municipal olive tree without a second look, which is roughly what most passersby here do. The square is unstaffed and open at all hours, a two minute walk from Evangelismos metro station.
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写真：macrolepis (CC BY 3.0)
5
The Holm Oak of the National Garden
Holm Oak (Quercus ilex) · 150+ years · Syntagma
The largest holm oak in the National Garden of Athens is old enough to have been planted by Queen Amalia's own gardeners, and big enough that it is rarely matched by wild specimens anywhere else in Greece. Amalia, the Bavarian-born wife of Greece's first king, Otto, commissioned the garden in 1839 as the country's first Western-style landscaped park, bringing in the French landscape architect François-Louis Bareaud to lay it out and filling it with species from across the Mediterranean and beyond. The holm oak is one of the survivors of that original planting scheme, now well past 150 years old, its evergreen canopy dense enough to blacken the ground beneath it even at midday. Unlike the garden's more famous palms and the eucalyptus that arrived later from Australia, Quercus ilex is native to Greece, so this particular tree represents restraint rather than imperial botanical trophy hunting, a local species given room to reach a size it rarely gets in the wild once grazing and firewood collecting are factored in. The tree stands among the garden's quieter paths, away from the pond and the small zoo that draw most visitors. Entry to the National Garden is free, every day, year round.
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写真：LBM1948 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Cypresses of the First Cemetery of Athens
Mediterranean Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) · 165-190 years · Mets
Athens's grandest 19th century cemetery reads like an open-air sculpture museum, and the cypresses planted around its edges were a public health measure before they were ever a landscaping choice. When the First Cemetery was established in 1837, four years after Otto arrived as Greece's first king, municipal rules required burial grounds to sit at least 100 metres outside the city and to be screened with trees, ideally on a hillside for ventilation, a sanitary theory of the era that happened to also produce a genuinely beautiful result. Cypress, pine and olive went in from the start, and the layout was formalised in 1861 into the maze of paths visitors walk today. Cypress carries its own symbolism here beyond the practical planting brief: in Greek tradition it is the tree of mourning and the underworld, planted in cemeteries for exactly the reason it now shades this one. Some of the original trees from that 1837 to 1861 planting window are still standing, making them among the oldest deliberately planted cypresses in modern Athens, though no individual specimen here has its own published age or measurement. The cemetery holds the graves of Heinrich Schliemann and Melina Mercouri among thousands of others, is free to enter, and stays open daily.
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7
The Plane Trees of Zappeion
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 60-165 years, mixed generations · Syntagma
Almost two hundred plane trees went into the ground around the Zappeion in 1857, two decades before the neoclassical hall they now surround had even been designed. The gardens predate their own centrepiece building, laid out first in a formal French geometric style and later softened into looser English-style plantings, with eucalyptus imported from Australia joining the original planes early on. The Zappeion itself, completed in 1888, went on to host fencing at the first modern Olympics in 1896 and, decades later, the signing of Greece's accession treaty to the European Communities in 1979, so its plane-lined approach has watched two very different kinds of history. Oriental plane is the tree most associated with Greek public space generally, prized for a canopy dense enough to cool a whole square and bark that flakes away in patches, shedding pollution and disease along with it. Most of the original 1857 trees have since been replaced or supplemented after a century and a half of storms and old age, so what stands today is a mixed-generation avenue rather than a single dateable planting, honestly closer to 60 to 165 years old tree by tree. The gardens are free and open daily, a short walk from Syntagma Square through the adjoining National Garden.
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写真：Joseph Hubbard (CC BY)
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The Olive Woodland of Filopappou Hill受け継いだのではなく植えられた
Olive (Olea europaea) · roughly 70 years · Filopappou, Koukaki
Before 1954, Filopappou Hill was mostly bare, grazed down to scrub with the occasional stray olive holding on. What covers it today, a deliberately hypnotic woodland of hundreds of olive trees planted in staggered density, is not survival but design: the architect Dimitris Pikionis spent three years reshaping the hill by hand, with his students and local stonemasons paving footpaths from salvaged marble fragments and demolished building rubble rather than working from finished drawings. He replaced the site's non-native planting with species indigenous to Attica, olive chief among them, and the result is now considered one of the twentieth century's most significant works of landscape architecture, studied by architecture schools well beyond Greece. None of this makes the trees themselves ancient. Most of what visitors walk through is roughly seventy years old, deliberately planted rather than inherited, a different kind of remarkable than this list's older entries but a genuine one: a hillside redesigned as a single artwork, with the Acropolis framed through the branches from angles Pikionis chose on purpose. The paths pass the so-called Prison of Socrates and the Monument of Philopappos at the summit. Entry to the hill is free and unrestricted, at any hour.
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9
The Plane Trees of Kefalari, Kifisia
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · century-old, roughly 100-130 years · Kefalari, Kifisia
Kifisia was ancient Athens' summer retreat long before it became modern Athens' wealthiest suburb, and the plane trees shading Kefalari Square are the clearest living link between the two. The name Kefalari refers to the spring, the head of the water source that made this specific spot on the southern slopes of Mount Penteli desirable enough to draw the city's elite out of the Attic basin for centuries, first as an escape from summer heat and later, from the 1920s on, as a fashionable dining and promenade district it remains today. The plane trees shading the square and its surrounding streets are commonly described as century-old, tall enough now to close over the road in places, though no single tree here carries its own individual measurement or planting record the way a protected monument tree would. Platanus orientalis needs exactly the steady water Kefalari's spring provides, which is why the species clusters this thickly here and thins out elsewhere in a city built mostly on dry limestone. The trees turn a deep gold in late autumn before dropping, a genuine seasonal marker rather than a subtle one. The square is free, public, and a short walk from Kifisia metro station, the Athens metro's northern terminus.
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10
The Rubber Fig of Drosopoulou Street
Rubber Fig (Ficus elastica) · age undocumented, exceptional size for a species usually grown as a houseplant · Kypseli
Most people know Ficus elastica as a houseplant that tops out against a ceiling. On Drosopoulou Street in Kypseli it has done something else entirely: grown into a street tree over 26 metres tall, taller than the apartment blocks lining the road around it. The Greek Tree Registry (Friends of Hellenic National Parks) measured it in August 2023 at 26.55 metres with a trunk just under a metre around, a scale mismatch that stops anyone who knows the species only from a windowsill. Kypseli itself has swung twice in little more than a century: laid out from 1908 on former farmland, an upmarket district of theatres and cinemas by the 1960s, then a cheaper, immigrant-heavy neighbourhood from the 1980s as wealthier residents moved north, and more recently a magnet for young Athenians drawn back by its interwar apartment blocks. Nobody has recorded when this particular tree went in the ground, so no institution puts a number on its age, an honest gap rather than a guess. What is measured is size: a species built for dry rooms and low light has instead spent decades in full Mediterranean sun, on a plain city pavement with no fence and no plaque, one more street tree to the people who pass it daily and a genuine oddity to anyone who has ever owned the version in a pot.
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The Washingtonia Palms of the National Garden Entrance
California Fan Palm (Washingtonia filifera) · widely stated as 150+ years; the specific origin story is likely inaccurate · Syntagma, west boundary of the National Garden on Vasilissis Amalias Avenue
Everyone will tell you Queen Amalia planted these palms herself. The dates do not allow it. Amalia laid out the National Garden between 1838 and 1840, pulling in plants from wherever she could reach, and she was deposed and left Greece for good in 1862. The California fan palm, Washingtonia filifera, did not reach European cultivation until seed arrived at a Belgian nursery around 1876, and the genus was not formally named until 1879, from those Belgian grown plants. That is fourteen years after her exile at the earliest. So the row almost certainly went in later, once the species could be had at all, and her name attached itself the way a founder's name attaches to everything in a garden she founded. None of which makes the palms less worth walking to. Twelve of them, around 25 metres tall, stand in line at the garden's central gate on Vasilissis Amalias Avenue, bare trunked above the traffic of Syntagma, and the European garden heritage network lists them among the garden's defining historic plantings. They are the most photographed planting inside it. Their real age nobody has published: a Washingtonia of that height means many decades of growth, so 100 to 150 years is an honest bracket rather than a measurement. The pin is a documented gate on the correct side of the garden, not a surveyed position on the palms themselves.
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12
The Plane Tree of Platanos Square
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · at least a century; called 'centuries-old' by local tradition, no institutional dating found · Plaka
The taverna took its name from the tree, not the other way round. O Platanos has served under this plane at Diogenous 4 since 1932, and the small Plaka square it stands in is called Platanos, plane tree, because that is what people navigated by. In the 1920s the painters Pericles Byzantios and Pavlos Kalligas and the sculptor Fokion Rokos met in its shade; Henry Miller and Patrick Leigh Fermor both wrote about eating here. Nobody has dated the tree. Local tradition calls it centuries old and every source repeats that phrase without a number, so we are not going to invent one. What can be said is that by 1932 it was already large and distinctive enough for a business to name itself after it, which puts a floor under it: upward of a century is the honest reading, and the rest is tradition. It stands a minute north of the entrance to the Roman Agora, which is a strange thing to sit and think about, because the plane is the tree of Greek public life. It is what Socrates and Phaedrus lie under by the Ilissos in Plato's dialogue, arguing through the heat of the afternoon. This one shades a square where people still argue over lunch. The tables belong to the taverna. The square and the shade do not.
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