The Navarino Square Plane

This plane tree has spent three centuries next to one of the more improbable ruins in central Thessaloniki: the palace the Roman emperor Galerius built for himself around 300 AD, excavated directly beside the square where the tree now stands. Core-sampled at around 310 years old, it grew up during the Ottoman period beside a public fountain that made this corner the social centre of the old Lefko Temenos neighbourhood, a meeting point for the district's merchant class long before the square took its current name from a 19th-century naval battle. Its most quietly remarkable feat is what it did not do: on 18 August 1917, a fire that started in a kitchen a few streets away spread through the wind-dried Ottoman-era city centre and destroyed roughly a third of Thessaloniki in a single day, and flames reportedly reached this tree's position without taking it down. Three other plane trees the city has since identified as comparably old all stood, by chance or design, outside that fire's path too. Today the tree shares its square with a fountain sculpture of a whistling boy and the low Roman walls it has outlived by seventeen centuries.