The Wybicki Oak (Dąb Wybickiego)

Poland's national anthem was written by a boy who grew up under this oak, and Będomin has made a shrine of both. Józef Wybicki was born in the manor here in 1747, and family tradition, repeated by the regional tourism board, says he played beneath this tree's crown as a child, decades before he wrote the words that became Mazurek Dąbrowskiego. The oak was already old when he was young. It is put today at roughly 400 years, its trunk about 6.8 metres round, though the region's records disagree by close to half a metre depending on who held the tape. In 2013 it was voted Poland's Tree of the Year. The following year it placed third in the European contest, drawing nearly 17,000 votes from a continent's worth of strangers who had never stood under it. Age has since caught up with it. A 2019 inspection found the oak weakened, its heaviest limbs now held up with cables and steel props, and conservators planted a genetic clone beside it the same year, insurance in wood for whenever the original finally gives out. It is still standing. The manor is now the National Anthem Museum, run by the National Museum in Gdańsk, and the oak grows in its grounds: a few złoty for entry, less on Fridays and Saturdays, closed Mondays.