The Kastro Plane

At the corner of two narrow streets below Thessaloniki's Byzantine walls stands a tree old enough to have watched the Ottomans arrive. Core-sampled in 2019 as part of a university study, the Kastro plane came back at approximately 828 years, more than double the age of the next oldest tree the same study found in the city, and its size in photographs over a century old is barely different from its size today, the signature of a tree that stopped growing quickly long ago rather than one still filling out. Part of its trunk is dead, hollowed and split, but enough living tissue remains around it to keep the crown alive, a common shape for a tree this age rather than a sign of imminent failure. For most of its life it grew beside a public fountain, fed by an aqueduct running down from the nearby Vlatades Monastery, at the exact spot where an Ottoman Turkish neighbourhood met a Greek one. The fountain was demolished around 1940 when the street was widened, and researchers who study the tree today note its vigour has declined somewhat since, water it no longer gets. It still stands at the corner of Acropoleos and Eptapyrgiou streets, a short climb up from the modern city into the old one.