The Old Acacia of Szechenyi Square

This tree is celebrated for being 227 years old, and a historian has taken that number apart with photographs. The popular account, carried by Az Ev Faja when the tree was nominated in 2015, has it planted in 1789, the year the Bastille fell, as the last survivor of a Danube side avenue laid out in the 1780s. That would make it older than the Chain Bridge beside it, older than the Academy of Sciences and older than the Gresham Palace. Then Zsofia Viczian went through the pictures. Photographs and postcards of the square from before 1867 show no tree at this spot, only the mound of earth raised for a coronation. Gyorgy Klosz photographed the place in 1875 and cart drivers are standing where the trunk was supposedly already growing. The tree first appears as a substantial thing in a postcard from the 1930s, which would put it nearer 120 or 150 years. Both accounts are in print and neither has given way. Whatever its age, it is a wreck kept upright by attention. The trunk leans hard, about four metres around and only six metres tall, propped since the 1980s on wooden supports set on iron beams, cushioned where they meet the bark. A large branch died in that decade and took its counterweight with it. It came through the war and nine renamings of the square. It stands on a paved traffic island, so you cross a road to reach it.