Cypresses in Hierapolis/Pamukkale

The trees stand quietly tall, stately slender with branches upturned. They line long avenues in northern Mediterranean countries and shade white headstones in cemeteries. They figure in mythology and poetry, flourish on carpets and tiles and decorate paintings and embroideries. Do they have a use? Yes but perhaps not what one would think. The Italians claim the cypress for Tuscany.

The Iranians would like you to know that they have one that has been growing in a village near Shiraz for more than 5,000 years. The ancient Greeks believe they were created by one of their gods. Istanbul can even boast of a street named for a row of cypress that once bordered a cemetery now long gone, replaced with the boxes in which our lives and hopes are buried.

The real tree

The range of the cypress extends from China and Japan to the northern Mediterranean, and in America from southern Oregon to Costa Rica. It is a cone-bearing plant of which there are 20 species and can be a small shrub or grow more than 150 feet in height. An evergreen, it has small, triangular leaves that are like scales adhering to the branch.

Normally the branches ascend upwards, unless heavy snowfall has pushed them downward. Its cones are round and take two years to mature; the same tree produces male and female seeds, self-propagating. Its trunk extends upward for two meters or so before the branches begin. It has very durable wood, yellowish or reddish, hard, dense and aromatic.

The tree produces essential oils and its wood is used in cabinet and coffin making and for musical instruments. The trees themselves make good garden additions and can make an effective windbreak. Cypressus sempervirens (the forever-living cypress) most likely originated in Syria or Persia, suggesting what? That one should consider that the Garden of Eden was to be found in that area? Elsewhere Asia Minor or Anatolia is given as the point of origin. The tree definitely is long-lived so the 5000-year-old tree (Some say it is only 4000 years old.) could easily be the case and that is probably how it acquired the adjective of being ever-living.

The Tuscans of Italy have tried to hijack its origin but this undoubtedly is not true. The ancient Etruscans may have brought it with them when they settled in Italy. They are known to have planted cypress trees around their cemeteries and the ancient Egyptians and Greeks used cypress wood for coffins, perhaps because the aroma would disguise the smell of the corpus. We’ll never know why or when cypress trees became associated with the dead and cemeteries – times long gone by perhaps.

There is more than one story about how the tree became known as “cypress.” One is that it was named for the island of Cyprus or the other, that it was named for a beautiful young man whose name was Cyparissus. He was an attendant to the god Apollo. There was a young deer that Apollo or he used to feed and he accidentally shot it to death. He mourned so much that the Gods felt sorry for him and changed him into a cypress tree. Another legend relates how a young Cretan man was fleeing the attentions of Apollo or Zephyrus and was turned into a tree.

Just how Cyprus came to bear the name Cyprus is not clear. The cypress tree grew in the wild there and similarly on the island of Crete. Sources say that people who were suffering from weak lungs went to Cyprus in order to be cured. To this day, English-speakers get confused between cypress the tree and Cyprus the island.

Origins and symbols

The myth of the sacred tree is imputed to Zoroaster, the founder of Zoroastrianism, a religion that is primarily based in northeast Iran and Afghanistan. Followers were forbidden from cutting down any tree that was in blossom as the tree was supposed to symbolize immortality.

It is not surprising to find sacred groves and trees widespread and not just in the Middle East. It spread throughout the western European world including Greece where we read, among other groves, of a grove of cypress at the sanctuary of Aescalypius on Cos Island. A penalty of 1000 drachmas was levied on anyone who cut down one of these trees. It has been common to worship trees since time immemorial, special trees, trees in groves as many of the most ancient of peoples believed that plants were animate and each contained a spirit or soul of its own.

They were a revered link between heaven and earth. Given that the life span of a tree and especially a cypress might be many times that of a human being, the tree could be considered eternal. Cutting one down was a cruelty that had to be paid for. In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the tree represents life given by God and therefore holds a special place in creation.

Some would attribute the origins of the sacred tree and sacred grove to the Garden of Eden and the so-called forbidden tree of good and evil, a tree that has been portrayed innumerable times in art and in literature although no one knows what it really might have looked like. For example in the Mesnevi by Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi, the cypress was considered an integral part of the garden, the garden of Paradise.

Today one might consider sacred the trees on which people come to tie ribbons and make small petitions for example to have a child. They are usually next to the tomb of someone who is considered holy and his spirit inhabits this tree. This is not just a custom in Turkey. We saw it spring up in the U.S. as a means of prayer or petition that young men who had gone to war would come back safely.

Though the cypress tree represented survival in the after life, it was also a sad tree at the same time; one of mourning that was often used for a funeral pyre. Still the cypress made an impressive and elegant figure in art on tiles, carpets, kilims and embroidery. Its slender but tall form easily fit in the designs prepared for those art forms.

In Ottoman poetry as in Persian poetry, many words for flowers and different trees such as the cypress had symbolic meaning. Take 18th century Nedim's famous invitation to a “swaying cypress” to go to Sadabad with him or the 15th century Seyhi who entreated his “strolling cypress” not to leave him.

Both referred to young men who were the lissome figure of beauty, tall and graceful and free. The term free is used and sometimes taken to mean the tree's evergreen nature is free of the effect of the seasons; however, it actually means not enslaved, independent in Ottoman Turkish so we understand that the object of the poet, the beloved (in mystic terms God), is free to choose, he can only be begged for his favour. Are the trees in Istanbul as old as the one in Iran? Undoubtedly not. But they will certainly be part of the cityscape as long as there is an Istanbul.

Source: Turkish Daily News