Bátaszék Downy Oak (St Orbán Hill oak)

In 2016 a hollow oak on a vineyard hill in southern Hungary beat every other tree in Europe, with 72,653 votes, a record for the contest at the time. A year earlier it had been named Hungary's Tree of the Year. It stands on Orbán Hill at the edge of Bátaszék, beside the small chapel of Saint Orbán, the patron of winegrowers. The trunk is 4.7 metres round and the crown rises to about 17.5 metres. Its age is given as 300 to 400 years, or simply about 400 in some reports. Nobody has measured it, so the range is the honest answer. What it has lived through reaches us as local tradition rather than record. By that account it came through the Ottoman period, and during the Danube flood of 1956 residents sheltered on the hill and mass was said beside it. The town's care for it has always been practical. Farmers cut away its dead branches and painted the stumps against disease, and on Saint Orbán's Day, 25 May, locals pour wine over the trunk in the hope of a good grape harvest. It is a strange sort of offering to make to an oak, and the oak has so far returned the favour by staying alive. That is the appeal. A small wine town tended one tree by hand for generations, then sent it to the top of a continent.