The Old Acacia of Erzsebet Square

A 1960s survey by Budapest's own parks department already described this black locust as over a hundred years old, which places its planting somewhere in the 1860s, not long after Erzsebet Square itself was laid out on the site of a demolished monastery cemetery. It has stood at the corner toward Jozsef Attila utca through everything the square went through since: the aftermath of the square's namesake, Empress Elisabeth's assassination in 1898, the arrival of the city's first long-distance bus station on the same ground in the 20th century, and the underground shopping centre and park redesign that replaced the bus station later still. Black locusts are not typically long-lived or especially prized trees; 19th-century Hungary planted them mainly to bind the sandy soil of the Great Plain rather than for their looks, which makes this one's survival at the dead centre of the capital more a matter of civic accident than deliberate preservation. It has not gone entirely unscathed: its upper branch dried out sometime in the 1980s, and it has leaned slowly ever since, now propped at two points by the city's own parks maintenance company rather than left to fall on its own schedule. Nobody planted it to be remembered. It simply refused to be removed for a century and a half while the square around it was rebuilt three times over.