Erguvan Ağacı (Judas Tree)

The Tree That Turns the Bosphorus Purple

For a few weeks from mid-April into May, the slopes along both shores of the Bosphorus take on a deep rose-purple. The color belongs to the erguvan, a small tree that flowers before its leaves open, so that for a short season the wood seems to bloom directly out of its own bark. Then the petals fall, the heart-shaped leaves open, and the color withdraws for another year. Few trees are tied so closely to a single city. In Istanbul the erguvan has marked the arrival of spring and the authority of empire, and it carries an old story about shame.

This entry follows the tree through its botany and through the layers of meaning it has gathered in this geography. For other plants that hold memory in the same way, see the ters lale, the weeping bride of eastern Anatolia, and the Kazdağı göknarı, where myth and ecology grow on the same mountain.

What the tree is

The erguvan is Cercis siliquastrum, a member of the legume family (Fabaceae), the same broad family as beans and peas. It is a modest tree, usually four to ten metres tall, often growing with several trunks rather than a single straight stem.

Its most striking habit is botanical. The flowers emerge straight from the trunk and the older branches, a trait called cauliflory that is common in tropical species and unusual in a temperate Mediterranean tree. 

The blossoms appear in clusters before the foliage, which is why a flowering erguvan looks covered in color from the ground up. The leaves that follow are rounded and heart-shaped. The flowers are edible, with a faintly sweet, slightly acidic taste, and they have long been added to salads for color.

The tree is native to the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia, including Anatolia and the Levant. It favors limey, well-drained soil that runs slightly alkaline, and dislikes heavy clay and ground that stays wet. 

Along the Bosphorus it has become so much a part of the spring landscape that its bloom feels inseparable from the city. Its Latin name records a quiet detail of its form. Cercis comes from the Greek kerkis, the weaver's shuttle, after the shape of its seed pods, and siliquastrum comes from the Latin siliqua, meaning pod.

The word erguvan

In Turkish, erguvan names both the tree and a color. As an adjective, erguvani describes a particular purple, the rose-tinged purple of the blossom itself.

The word came into Turkish from Persian arğavan (ارغوان), which already carried the sense of this purplish-red and the tree that produces it. This is one of many words that reached Turkish through Persian and settled deep into the language, a pattern worth knowing for any learner trying to feel where Turkish vocabulary comes from. 

The link between a plant and a color is worth pausing on, because the rest of the tree's history depends on it. The erguvan did not produce the famous purple of antiquity. Turkish inherited the tree and the color sense together through Persian, where one word already named both. The connection is a visual one, between the blossom and the shade.

Byzantium and the imperial purple

In Constantinople, purple carried the full weight of empire. The color stood for the right to rule. By the Byzantine period the most prestigious purple silks were bound to imperial authority, and their use was controlled through sumptuary law around the emperor and his household.

Here the accurate history and the popular story diverge, and the distinction matters. The true imperial purple of Rome and Byzantium, known as Tyrian purple, was a dye extracted from the mucus of predatory sea snails of the murex family, harvested in enormous numbers along the eastern Mediterranean coast. 

Producing a small amount of dye required many thousands of snails, which is why the color was rarer than gold and reserved for the powerful. The erguvan tree had no part in making it. What the tree shares with the dye is the shade, and in Turkish the tree's name became the everyday word for that shade.

The purple ran through Byzantine life in concrete ways. Children born to a reigning emperor were called porphyrogennetos, "born in the purple," after a chamber in the palace said to be lined with purple stone. 

Emperors and their close family were buried in sarcophagi of porphyry, a hard purple-red stone, and several of these still sit in the garden of the Istanbul Archaeology Museums. The phrase "born in the purple" made imperial legitimacy something visible and inherited.

A tradition holds that Constantinople was dedicated in May 330, as the erguvan season was ending, with the date often given as 11 May. By a coincidence that later writers loved, the city fell to Mehmed II eleven centuries afterward, on 29 May 1453, at the close of a siege that had begun during the erguvan season. 

These dates carry the weight of legend more than of strict record, and they are best read as part of the city's memory of itself rather than as precise botany.

The Judas tree and the story of shame

Across European languages, the tree's names fall into two clusters. English and Italian keep the Judas association, as the Judas tree and Albero di Giuda. French preserves the older geographical form, Arbre de Judée, the tree of Judea. Spanish often calls it árbol del amor, the tree of love, after its heart-shaped leaves, though árbol de Judas is also used.

Two explanations sit behind the darker name, and they pull in different directions.

The first is linguistic and probably closer to the truth. The tree grew widely across Judea, and the French Arbre de Judée, "tree of Judea," seems to have shifted over time into Arbre de Judas, "tree of Judas." A place name slowly became a personal name through ordinary corruption of speech.

The second is the legend that grew around that slip, and it is the one most people remember. According to Christian folklore, the erguvan once bore white flowers. When Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus and afterward hanged himself, the tree he is said to have chosen was this one. The tree was so ashamed of its part that its flowers never returned to white and blushed a deep pink-red instead. Some versions add that its branches turned thin and brittle from then on, so that it could never again bear a hanging. Details from the tree's real form were folded into the story. The flowers blooming straight from the trunk were read as drops of blood, and the heart-shaped leaves as a sign of a greedy heart.

The source text is worth checking here. The Gospel account in Matthew (27:3–8) reports that Judas hanged himself and names no tree. The species identification came centuries later, with the name well established in English by the seventeenth century. The legend is a later imagining attached to the plant, not a detail from scripture. A small folk note survives alongside it. White-flowered specimens of the tree exist as a horticultural variety, and older storytellers liked to read them as a memory of its original color, the form it had before the shame.

This pattern, where a plant carries grief from religious tradition, is not unique to the erguvan. The ters lale (weeping bride) gathers sorrow from three different traditions into a single drooping flower, and the two trees make a useful pair if you want to see how the same landscape lets several faiths leave their mark on the same living thing.

The Ottoman erguvan

When the city became Ottoman, the tree kept its place. Erguvans were planted and protected in gardens, and their branches were valued enough to appear in court life. The flowers continued to be scattered over salads at the palace table, and the wood was used to make walking sticks.

The tree also had its own festivals. The tradition of spring "Erguvan" gatherings is associated by tradition with Emir Sultan in Bursa, and it is firmly documented from the fifteenth century into the nineteenth, under names such as the erguvan festival and the erguvan assembly. 

The seventeenth-century traveller Evliya Çelebi, describing a procession of Istanbul's guilds in his Seyahatname, recorded erguvan branches carried in the parade among the flowers. The tree had become part of how the city marked the turning of the year.

In the language today

The erguvan still works as a word as much as a tree. Erguvani remains a usable color term, and the tree appears in the titles of poems and songs, where it tends to stand for spring in Istanbul and for a beauty that lasts only a short while.

A few words worth keeping:

• erguvan — the Judas tree; also the rose-purple color of its blossom

• erguvani — of that purple color (the -i here forms a relational adjective, "of the erguvan")

• erguvan mevsimi — the erguvan season, the few weeks in spring when the tree blooms

• mor — the general Turkish word for purple, broader than erguvani

When you next see the Bosphorus turn purple in late spring, the color carries all of this at once. It is the shade an emperor once guarded and the flower a folk story claims was once white. The tree itself simply flowers, briefly and from its own trunk, and then lets the color go.