The Oak of Drnava

In 2020 this oak took 5,246 of the 24,839 votes cast in Strom roka and was named Slovakia's tree of the year, then went on to represent the country in the European Tree of the Year contest. Not bad for a tree standing at stop two of a village nature trail. It is reckoned at about 700 years old and it appears in Drnava's village chronicle from 1670, which means it was already old when anyone here first thought to write it down. It is not tall: 14 metres, modest for an oak of this age, with a trunk 528 centimetres round and a crown spreading 21 metres. Ancient oaks stop reaching up and start reaching sideways, and this one has been doing that for centuries. The ground around it has a stranger history than the tree does. Drnava was nicknamed Kis Pest, Little Pest, after the Andrássy ironworks that ran here in the nineteenth century and cast structural parts for the Chain Bridge in Budapest in the 1840s. The oak had already been in the village chronicle for 170 years by then, and it stands near that former works today. Open ground inside the village, free, nothing to book. It sits on the Poklady Drnavy trail, the Treasures of Drnava. The nearest station is Rožňava, then a regional bus.