The White Tower Plane

Standing across the square from the White Tower, Thessaloniki's best-known monument, this plane tree is younger than its two counterparts in Kastra and Navarino Square, core-sampled at around 235 years old, yet it is the largest of the four by a clear margin: 26.4 metres tall with a trunk 140 centimetres through at chest height, taller and thicker than the 828-year-old tree in the old town above it. The gap says less about the tree's own vigour than about its ground: a wide-open waterfront square, full sun and no competing canopy, will grow a plane tree faster than a narrow street between old stone walls, whatever extra centuries the older tree has had to work with. Both were included in the same 2019 university study that first proposed protecting Thessaloniki's oldest trees as natural monuments, dated by core sample rather than the rougher girth-based estimates most cities settle for. The White Tower itself, an Ottoman-era fortification turned museum, has stood on the waterfront since the 15th century, more than seven times longer than this tree, and yet the two are usually photographed together, the tower for what it has witnessed and the tree for simply being enormous.