Tree of Hippocrates

Kos town built its main square around a tree. At Platia Platanou, the Square of the Platane, an oriental plane spreads a crown roughly 12 metres wide, said to be the largest of any plane tree in Europe. Tradition holds that Hippocrates taught medicine to his students in its shade, and the name has stuck ever since. The tree standing there today is around 500 years old, so it cannot be the one Hippocrates knew, although it may descend from it.

Historical Background

Hippocrates and the Legend of the Tree

Hippocrates was born on Kos around 460 BC and is remembered as the founder of Western medicine. The Hippocratic Oath, the ethical text attached to his name, is still adapted and recited in medical schools today. Kos was a real centre of ancient medicine as well as a symbolic one: the island's sanctuary of Asklepios, a short way outside town, drew patients from across the Greek world.

The link between Hippocrates and this particular plane is tradition rather than record. No ancient source places his teaching under it, and the arithmetic rules it out, since the tree is roughly 500 years old while Hippocrates died some 2,400 years ago. What has survived is the association itself, kept alive by the town, by visitors, and by the cuttings sent abroad in the tree's name.

The Apostle Paul Story

A second tradition holds that Paul of Tarsus preached on this spot in the first century AD. The Acts of the Apostles records that Paul's ship put in at Kos on the voyage from Miletus towards Syria, but nothing in the text ties him to the square. Like the Hippocrates story, it is local memory rather than documented history, and it explains why one small square carries both a medical and a Christian association.

Cuttings and Seeds Around the World

Whatever the tree's true age, its descendants are real and widely scattered. Medical institutions have taken seeds and cuttings from it for decades, usually as a symbolic link back to Hippocrates:

• North America: the National Library of Medicine received a specimen in 1961; others went to Yale University, Harvard Medical School, the University of Michigan, Brown University, East Carolina University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
• Europe: the University of Glasgow, the University of Barcelona, Queen's University Belfast and the Royal College of Physicians in London.
• Elsewhere: the University of Sydney and Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Perth, Burwood Hospital in New Zealand, Kyushu University in Japan (1973), and the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

The Tree Today

Centuries of fungi and wood-boring insects have hollowed out the trunk, and several of the heavy lower branches are now carried on metal scaffolding. The canopy still throws enough shade to cover most of the square. A marble tap with Arabic inscriptions stands beside it, put up by the Ottoman governor Gazi Hassan Pasha, who also built the mosque that closes one side of the square in 1776.

Where It Sits

Platia Platanou lies at the edge of Kos old town, directly in front of the Castle of the Knights, the harbour fortress the Knights of St John held until 1522. The mosque, the castle bridge and the tree are all within a few paces of one another, which makes the square the natural first stop on any walk through the old town. It is open ground rather than a ticketed site, so there is nothing to book and no closing time; in summer the square is used for local events.

Visiting the Tree of Hippocrates

• The square is a two-minute walk from the main harbour quay and inside the car-free part of town.
• Ten minutes is enough to see the tree itself; the castle next door needs an hour or more.
• Shade and benches make it a workable pause between the harbour and the Roman ruins further inland.

Kos town's compact centre suits arrivals by sea better than most Greek island capitals, since the quay, the square and the castle sit within a few hundred metres of each other. That is the appeal of seeing the island from the water, and a Kos gulet cruise usually leaves enough time ashore to take in the tree, the castle and lunch in the old town before sailing on.