The Oak of Dubinné

Nobody can date this oak, because the wood that held the answer has rotted away. The village says so itself: the tree is hollow and its oldest part is irretrievably gone. What is left is a trunk 733 centimetres round at chest height, swelling to roughly twelve metres of buttressed mass at ground level, 25 metres of height, and a working figure of at least 800 years. It is widely taken to be the oldest oak in Slovakia, and in 2010 it won Strom roka, the national tree of the year vote. Its list of near misses is long. Villagers are said to have paid a ransom to save it from felling during the Hussite wars in the middle of the fifteenth century. Soldiers used it as a reference point in both world wars. It came through the fire that burnt the village in 1913 and another in 1985 started by a smoke bomb. Lightning struck it in 1995. It is still standing. The chapel beside it was built after an eighteenth-century report of a Marian apparition in its crown, which says more about what this tree has meant here than any contest result does. Open ground next to the road, free, no gate. Dubinné sits about fifteen kilometres southeast of Bardejov and is reached by regional bus.