Eichigt is a small Saxon village on the Vogtland border with one tree that outranks every other in the district for thickness. It is named for a poet-soldier who slept beneath it for one night in 1813, months before he died in battle at twenty-one, and it still stands on the meadow that has carried his name ever since. The village calls it the thickest lime, and the thickest tree of any species, anywhere in the Vogtland, and asks nobody to take that on faith: the tape reads 7.27 metres round.
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Foto: A. Köppl (CC BY 3.0)
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Körnerlinde (Eichigt)
Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos) · roughly 500 years (source disagreement, see notes) · Eichigt, Vogtland
On the night of 8 June 1813 the poet Theodor Koerner bivouacked with part of his volunteer corps on the meadow beside this lime, days before a raid on Hof and months before he was killed in action at twenty-one. The village never let go of it. The meadow is still called the Husarenwiese, the Hussar Meadow, and the tree is the Koernerlinde. It is also, by the reckoning of the village itself, the thickest lime and the thickest tree of any kind in the Vogtland district, and second only to the Swedish Oak of Weida across the wider historical region. The tape reads 7.27 metres round. The height recorded by the dendrological register is 42 metres, which is tall for a lime and worth seeing for that alone. Its age is disputed and the gap is honest rather than careless: the village and regional tradition put it at 350 to 400 years, while the register that measured it in February 2024 and found it vital estimates about 500. Take the wider band. Either way it was already a substantial tree when Koerner's hussars lay under it, and it still stands where they did, on open grass beside the church in a Saxon border village with no railway station.
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