On a sunny morning in October of last year, Mahmut Miski stood in the boulder-strewn foothills of an active volcano in the Cappadocia region of central Turkey, sweeping an arm towards a thicket of grooved, buff-colored stalks shaded by wild pistachio trees. Many historians view the disappearance of silphion as the first recorded extinction of any species, plant or animal, and a cautionary tale in how thoroughly human appetite can erase a species from the wild.īut is silphion truly extinct? Thanks to a lucky encounter almost 40 years ago, and decades of subsequent research, a professor at Istanbul University suspects he has re-discovered the last holdouts of the ancient plant more than a thousand years after it disappeared from history books, and nearly a thousand miles from where it once grew. ![]() Since the Middle Ages, botanical explorers inspired by ancient accounts of this remarkable plant have sought it on three continents, and always in vain. Abundant snowmelt in 2022 irrigated the site they grow in central Turkey, resulting in a riotous bloom of intoxicating flowers. Right: These mature Ferula drudeana plants are believed to be around 15 years old. “Just one stalk has been found,” Roman chronicler Pliny the Elder lamented in his Natural History in the first century A.D., “and it has been given to the Emperor Nero.” after a “black rain” fell) silphion disappeared from the ancient Mediterranean world. During the reign of Julius Caesar, more than a thousand pounds of the plant was stockpiled alongside gold in Rome’s imperial treasuries, and silphion saplings were valued at the same price as silver.īut just seven centuries after the adored plant was first documented growing along the coast of Cyrenaica, in what is now modern Libya (according to one chronicler, it was in 638 B.C. For Roman chefs, it was a culinary staple, crucial for spicing up an everyday pot of lentils or finishing an extravagant dish of scalded flamingo. For ancient Greek physicians, silphion was a cure-all, prized for everything from stomach pain to wart removal. ![]() ![]() From before the rise of Athens to the height of the Roman Empire, one of the most sought-after products in the Mediterranean world was a golden-flowered plant called silphion.
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