The Oak of Šulekova Steps

An Adriatic oak has no obvious business growing this far north. Quercus virgiliana belongs to the warm hill country around the Adriatic, and this specimen, twenty five metres tall with a trunk three and a half metres round, is protected twice over in Slovakia's state register, first in 1982 and again on review in 1996, cited for its rarity as much as its size. It grows at the top edge of the Šulekova stairway, one of the steep public staircases that climb the slope below Bratislava Castle, with its roots sitting right at the boundary the register itself describes between the public steps and a private plot next door. Stand on the stairs and the crown is directly overhead, no gate and no permission needed, though the tree's own base sits close enough to the property line that the honest advice is to admire it from the steps rather than step off them. The register's eighty year estimate at its 1996 review puts today's age past a century, an old tree for a young use, holding a slope that has been climbed on foot for as long as the neighbourhood above it has existed.