Istanbul's most storied trees were not supposed to be the ones that survived. The plane that watched Mehmed the Conqueror ride into the fallen city in 1453 stood in Topkapı Palace's first courtyard until 1928. Dolmabahçe's palace planes were felled for canker disease in 2022. What lived through centuries instead turns out to be humbler: trees inside a university's working forest, a bazaar entrance with a poet living under it since 1964, a plane a 2017 storm knocked flat that gardeners nursed back upright. Istanbul's oldest tree, at roughly 1,300 years, predates the Ottoman conquest by seven centuries.
0 / 14 visitadas em Istanbul
1
The Oldest Plane of Bahçeköy
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 1,300-1,400 years · Bahçeköy, Sarıyer
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.
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2
The Ahtapot Çınar
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · up to 580 years · Bahçeköy, Sarıyer
Seven trunks that are actually one tree share a single root system at this bend in the Bahçeköy forest. Its lowest branches touched the ground centuries ago and thickened into limbs that now radiate outward like separate trunks, which is how a plane tree ends up nicknamed the Octopus. Turkish foresters put its age at up to 580 years, old enough that a local claim ties its early growth to the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent in the 1500s, though a more conservative reading of the trunk puts it closer to 400. Either figure makes it one of the oldest individually named trees in the city, and unlike most ancient planes, which grow as a single vertical column, this one spread sideways instead, its lowest limbs thick enough to sit on. At over 40 metres tall and more than 3 metres across at the base, it dominates a bend on the old road between Çayırbaşı and Bahçeköy, a stop on the hiking routes that cross Belgrad Forest today. Locals photograph it for the shape. Foresters study it for what centuries of horizontal growth actually does to a trunk that size.
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Foto: Janabaevazizbek (CC BY-SA 4.0)
3
The Hüseyin Avni Dede Plane
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 375 years · Beyazıt, Fatih
A tree in Istanbul has had the same downstairs neighbour for 58 years. Hüseyin Avni Dede came to sell books and antiques under this 375-year-old plane at the entrance to the Sahaflar Çarşısı, Istanbul's old book bazaar, in 1964, when he was ten years old and working alongside his poet father. He never really left, aside from a three-month gap in 1968. In 2022 Istanbul's Metropolitan Municipality made it official and renamed the tree after him, the Hüseyin Avni Dede Çınarı. The tree's own history runs darker. For generations Istanbulites remembered it as the Cellat Çınarı, the Executioner's Plane, because condemned prisoners were hanged from its branches into the 1960s and 70s, a detail that sits oddly beside a poet who has spent a lifetime selling verse under the same wood. Planted sometime in the mid-1600s, the tree has outlived the executions, the sultans, and most of the original Sahaflar booksellers who once worked around it. Dede is still there most days, technically a tenant of a plane tree older than the country it now stands in.
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Foto: Luke Padon (CC BY 4.0)
4
The Taşlı Çınar
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 446 years · Alemdar, Fatih
A stone was lodged inside this tree's bark for roughly three centuries, and until about ten years ago you could still see it. According to the story attached to the tree, Sultan Ahmed I rode past on his white horse sometime between 1590 and 1617 while the Alemdar gate and fountain to what is now Gülhane Park were being built, and a stone kicked loose from a horseshoe struck the sapling and stayed there as it grew, sealed a few metres up the trunk like a fossil. Whether or not the horse is real, the tree is: Istanbul's own monumental tree registry lists it at roughly 446 years old, 26 metres tall, with a trunk 328 centimetres around, the thickest Oriental plane in the district. The embedded stone was removed during conservation work about a decade ago, leaving a visible cavity where it used to sit. What remains is a tree that has watched the road outside Gülhane Park go from Ottoman thoroughfare to tram line, still standing exactly where a legend says a sultan's horse put it there.
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5
The Çengelköy Plane
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · roughly 180 years · Çengelköy, Üsküdar
This tree spent a night on the ground and got back up. For around 180 years the plane tree at Çengelköy's ferry pier square was the neighbourhood's defining landmark, a canopy wide enough to shade the waterfront tea garden now named Çınaraltı after it. In July 2017 a storm that felled more than 2,000 trees across Istanbul tore this one out of the ground, root ball and all. City crews arrived the next morning and, rather than clear it away, tried something rarer: they propped the trunk back into position, wrapped the exposed roots in felt to stop them drying out, pruned back the crown to reduce the load, and waited. Nothing visible happened for a year. Then new shoots appeared, then small leaves, then, over successive seasons, branches thick enough to look like a tree again rather than a patient. It has not fully recovered the shape it had before the storm, but locals who watched it get carried out for dead now watch it get greener every spring, sitting exactly where it always did at the edge of the Bosphorus.
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Foto: Evangelidis (CC BY-SA 4.0)
6
The Cypresses of Karacaahmet
Mediterranean Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) · 440+ years (planting tradition; individual trees unconfirmed) · Üsküdar
Nine cypresses inside Turkey's largest cemetery carry official Monument Tree status, and the tradition that put them there is older than any single trunk still standing. In 1582 Nurbanu Sultan, mother of the reigning sultan Murad III, donated 124 dönüms of her own land to expand Karacaahmet into a proper cemetery and had cypresses planted across it deliberately, assigning guards specifically to protect the trees. Cypresses became the default marker of an Ottoman grave from then on, dark green columns meant to stand for centuries the way a headstone stands for one lifetime. Whether any of the nine protected specimens here today are the actual seventeenth century plantings or later replacements grown from the same rootstock and tradition is not something any source pins down, which is honest: a cemetery replaces its cypresses the way it replaces its headstones, continuously, without announcing it. What is certain is that the practice has not stopped in over 440 years, and that walking Karacaahmet today, through roughly 750,000 square metres of graves under a cypress canopy older than most of the empire's other surviving buildings, is the closest thing Istanbul has to walking through an Ottoman forest.
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7
The Ata Fıstık Çamı
Stone Pine (Pinus pinea) · 397 years · Küçük Çamlıca, Üsküdar
The tree that gave a hill its name is not originally from this hill. Küçük Çamlıca, Istanbul's best known viewpoint on the Asian side, takes its name from the stone pines (çam) covering it, but foresters say the grove's own symbol tree, the Ata Fıstık Çamı, was brought here from the Aegean region generations ago and adapted to Bosphorus soil rather than growing here naturally. At roughly 397 years old, with a trunk 145 centimetres across and a crown reaching 25 metres, it predates the name Çamlıca itself, which only stuck once Sultan Abdülaziz began favouring the grove in the nineteenth century. Stone pines are usually grown for their edible pine nuts, and this one has produced them for longer than Istanbul has had streetlights, trams, or bridges across the Bosphorus. Istanbul's official monument tree registry lists it, and half a dozen younger pines around it, as individually protected, each with its own name and measured age, a small forest of transplants that outlived the reason anyone brought them here in the first place. The view from the hill gets the visitors. The tree that named the hill mostly gets ignored.
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8
The Florya Mastic Tree
Mastic Tree (Pistacia lentiscus) · roughly 500 years · Florya, Bakırköy
Most mastic trees stay shrub sized, a couple of metres of scrubby Mediterranean green grown for their resin, not their timber. The mastic tree inside Florya's Atatürk Forest did not get that memo. Estimated at around 500 years old, its trunk has thickened to roughly 2 metres across, the thickest mastic tree recorded anywhere in Istanbul by a wide margin, a shrub species behaving like an oak. Nobody taps it for resin the way Chios islanders have farmed the same species for a thousand years; this one grows purely as a curiosity inside a public forest planted from 1936 on reclaimed coastal land that used to be marsh. Walk the forest paths near the shore and you pass pines and cedars planted deliberately as part of a young republic's afforestation project, all of them younger than the mastic tree they grew up around, a five-century holdout that was already old when the rest of Florya was still open water.
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9
The Ehrami Servi of Büyükada
Mediterranean Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) · 244 years · Nizam, Büyükada
The only tree on this list that requires a ferry to reach stands on a residential street on Büyükada, the largest of Istanbul's car-free Princes' Islands. Istanbul's official monument tree registry lists this Mediterranean cypress, grown into the tall narrow pyramidal form the species is known for, at approximately 244 years old, 18 metres tall, with a trunk 75 centimetres across. It predates the island's Belle Epoque mansions, the Greek Orthodox monastery on the hill above it, and the horse-drawn carriages that until recently were the island's only form of wheeled transport. The registry protects it under three separate criteria at once, historical importance, age, and trunk diameter, a bureaucratic way of saying there was no single reason to save it, there were three. Büyükada's own history runs through Byzantine exile, this is where empresses and princes were once banished, and through White Russian refugees fleeing the 1917 revolution, none of which this cypress witnessed directly from its residential street, but which shaped an island growing quietly taller around it for two and a half centuries.
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Foto: Nanahuatl (CC BY-SA 4.0)
10
The Plane Trees of Beykoz Çayırı
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · 400-500 years (average, multiple trees) · Beykoz
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.
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11
The Topkapı Palace Courtyard Plane
Oriental Plane (Platanus orientalis) · roughly 700-800 years · Cankurtaran, Fatih
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.
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12
The Gülhane London Plane
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · roughly 285 years · Gülhane Park, Cankurtaran, Fatih
A London plane cannot be much older than about 350 years, because the hybrid did not exist before roughly 1670. This one, at about 285, comfortably fits, which is not true of every tree the Turkish registry files under that name. Two of Istanbul's own registered giants carry the same label at ages that would make the hybrid older than itself; here the arithmetic works, and the identification is plausible rather than proven. Turkey's national monumental tree registry records it at 33 metres tall with a trunk 170 centimetres across and an age of 277 years. Istanbul's metropolitan municipality publishes its own page for this exact tree, with identical measurements, saying it has stood in Gülhane Park since 1741. The two numbers add up to 2018, so both trace to one survey rather than two independent measurements. Two official bodies, one field visit, worth knowing. For most of its life nobody could walk past it. Gülhane was the outer garden of Topkapı Palace, court ground rather than public space, until it opened in 1912 as Istanbul's first public park. The tree was already 170 years old by then. It stands about 40 metres from a registered nettle tree of similar age, 350 metres from the Topkapı courtyard plane and 550 metres from the Taşlı Çınar, which makes this the densest walking cluster in the city.
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13
The Gülhane Nettle Tree
Mediterranean Hackberry (Celtis australis) · roughly 265 years · Gülhane Park, Cankurtaran, Fatih
Istanbul protects this tree by name, which is unusual for a species most cities treat as background. The Mediterranean hackberry, çitlembik in Turkish, normally gets planted for shade and forgotten. This one is 23 metres tall with a trunk 145 centimetres across, and it holds a place on Turkey's national monumental tree registry at an age of 259 years, with the city's own municipal tree project publishing a page for it saying it has stood in Gülhane Park since 1759. Those two figures resolve to the same year, 2018, so the national register and the city are reporting one survey between them rather than two separate measurements. That is worth stating. What makes the number credible anyway is the species: Celtis australis is a tough, long-lived tree in Anatolian conditions, so 265 years is physically ordinary for it, which is more than can be said for some of the plane ages in the same register. It stands roughly 40 metres from the registered London plane in the same park, and the pair are the reason to come. Gülhane was Topkapı's outer palace garden and stayed closed to the public until 1912, so this tree spent its first century and a half inside a court garden and its last hundred years among people eating simit under it. The Topkapı courtyard plane is 300 metres away.
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14
The Topkapı Palace Yew
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · roughly 310-320 years · Topkapı Palace, Cankurtaran, Fatih
For a yew, three centuries is early middle age. This one, in the Fourth Courtyard of Topkapı Palace, is registered at 314 years, 13 metres tall with a trunk 103 centimetres across and a crown 12 metres wide, which by the standards of a species that can run to millennia makes it a young adult with a long career ahead. The government record has quirks worth naming. Two views of the same database give the age as 314 and 310, a four-year drift, and one of them files the tree under a district hundreds of kilometres away in Ankara province while its own description talks about Topkapı, which is a clerical slip rather than a doubt about where the tree is. Separately, an independent field survey measured three yews in this courtyard, two of them 3.26 and 3.09 metres around, and photographed them in December 2014. That is the freshest direct evidence of them standing that this entry rests on, and it is now twelve years old. Unlike the other trees on this list, it costs money. The Fourth Courtyard was the sultan's private terrace garden, above the Golden Horn beside the Baghdad Kiosk that Murad IV built in 1639, and reaching it needs a Topkapı Palace museum ticket. The free trees of Gülhane Park are 550 metres downhill.
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