Dąb Słowianin (the Slavian Oak)

Słowianin means the Slav, and the name was chosen to make a point. Silesia spent centuries under pressure to stop being Polish, and this oak was given a name that said plainly which side of that it stood on, in memory of the Piast dukes who ruled the region in the Middle Ages. The tree has no recorded connection to any of them. It simply outlasted the argument. It is built low and heavy: 751 centimetres round but only 22 metres tall, a short massive trunk holding up a dome of a crown that measures 26.5 metres by 24.5. Both figures were taken in 2015. Estimates put it at 400 to 450 years old, which starts it somewhere around the turn of the seventeenth century, and its condition is currently described as good, which is not something you can say about most trees of that age. Poland voted it Tree of the Year in 2014 and sent it to represent the country at European Tree of the Year the following spring. It has been a protected natural monument since November 1979, decades before any of that. You will not find it in a park or on an estate. It stands in the open in Dębina, a village south-east of Wrocław in gmina Jelcz-Laskowice, with fields and houses around it and nothing charging admission. Dębina means oakwood, and on the evidence of this one the name still holds up.