THIS TREE, THIS YEAR

In the historical heart of Istanbul, in Beyazιt meydanι, one of the city's oldest and largest squares and a significant meeting site for political activities and gatherings, nestled between the Ottoman Bayezid II Mosque and the secondhand bookseller’s Bazar, stands a giant plane tree. It is estimated to be 540 years old this year.

The square is renowned not only for its mosque and adjacent university but also for its historical coffeehouses, named Çınaraltı -“under the plane tree” in Turkish- after the plane trees that surround the square. These coffeehouses have been vital gathering spots since the 16th century and they became hubs for revolutionary students and intellectuals especially between the 1930s and 1950s. However, in recent decades, due to increasingly repressive state apparatuses, public space has shrunk, with the area mostly becoming a tourism and trade center.

For the past 60 years, under the giant plane tree, a man has been selling his poetry books. Everyday, tree and man provide for a welcoming ecosystem and temporary refuge for many: pigeons, cats, seagulls, old street vendors, tourists and university students among others.

This video work captures a small fragment/ an instant in the evolving history of this urban square. The centenarian plane tree stands as the oldest living witness to these transformations. Weaving together interview fragments with passersby and close observations of the tree and its surrounds, the work is an attempt to gauge the fragility of the urban ecosystem sustained by the presence of a single tree as an anchor in space and time and its role in nurturing a complex web of life that has persisted for centuries.

The project is part of ongoing research on ancient trees as biodiversity habitats and as living time-machines connecting deep pasts and distant futures for human and more-than-human city dwellers. It was initiated during a research residency in Istanbul in spring 2024, focusing on plane trees designated as “monuments/monumental” by the Istanbul municipality, taking into account their notable presence in the materiality of the city, as well as in regional folklore and the social imaginary.