The Apostolou Pavlou Plane

The youngest of Thessaloniki's four core-sampled ancient planes, at around 205 years old, grows at the entrance to a house built in the final years of the Ottoman era and preserved today as the Atatürk Museum, the birthplace, by tradition, of the Turkish republic's founder, and now free to enter for anyone who visits. The tree is close to 21 metres tall, younger and slighter than its counterpart across town by the White Tower, but old enough to have stood over the building through the last Ottoman decades, the Greek annexation of the city in 1912, and everything since, including the handover of the building itself to the Turkish state as a museum. It was identified alongside the other three trees on this list in the same 2019 university study that dated all four by core sample rather than estimate, part of a proposal to give Thessaloniki's oldest trees formal protection as natural monuments, the kind of status usually reserved for buildings rather than the plants growing next to them.