Zalgiriai maps two trees. The Hermann Sudermann Oak, three trunks from one base at a combined girth of 4.62 metres, stands at the end of a trail with a strange claim to fame: the writer it is named for watched local peat-cutters at work here and turned their lives into a novella, which F.W. Murnau filmed in 1927 as Sunrise, winning three Academy Awards. It is the only natural monument in Nemunas Delta Regional Park. The Pagryniai Oak, 4.3 kilometres away, actually stands on the edge of Silute, a separate car stop.
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The Hermann Sudermann Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · not documented · Zalgiriai, Silute seniunija, Silute district, Nemunas Delta Regional Park
Three Academy Awards trace back to the bog at the end of this trail. Hermann Sudermann, the German-language writer the oak is named for, stayed often in the village of Zalgiriai and watched the peat-cutters at work here, then wrote their lives into his novella Die Reise nach Tilsit. F.W. Murnau filmed it in 1927 as Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, which took three awards at the first Academy Awards ceremony. The tree stands at the far end of the roughly two kilometre trail through that former peat-cutters' colony, and it is the reason for the walk rather than a stop along the way.
It is also the only natural monument in the whole of Nemunas Delta Regional Park. Three trunks rise from one base, 4.62 metres round between them and 17.6 metres tall. Lithuania placed it under state protection in 2005.
Sudermann died in 1928, a year after the film. The colony he wrote about is gone and the cutting has stopped, and the trail now runs through what those workers left behind. The oak is the last thing on it.
Nobody has dated this one. The recorded girth is a combined figure for three trunks rather than a single stem, which makes the usual growth-rate arithmetic unreliable, so the age stays an open question. If you know it, tell us.
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2
Pagryniai Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 300 years · Šilutė (southern edge)
Somebody measured this oak in 1987 and somebody has measured it since, and between the two readings it is still putting on wood. The 1987 survey, made when Lithuania raised it from a local nature monument to one of republic-level significance, recorded a diameter of 1.5 metres, which comes out at roughly 4.7 metres round, and a height of 24 metres. Today the figures are 5.17 metres of girth and 25 metres of height. Half a metre of trunk and a metre of tree in four decades.
Protection came first in 1960 and it is held now under a 2017 order of the Ministry of Environment. In its clearing the oak has a protective barrier around it and an information board beside it.
Its age is given as about 300 years. That is the source's figure rather than one worked out here, and it is as precise as anybody has been willing to be.
One thing to be clear about, because the address invites the wrong idea: this tree is not out in Žalgiriai. It stands on the southern edge of Šilutė itself, in a forest clearing about 300 metres off the Šilutė-Pagryniai road near Stadiono gatvė. The Hermann Sudermann Oak, which is the Žalgiriai tree, lies 4.3 kilometres away along the same local roads. The two make an obvious pairing for one afternoon, and nobody is walking from one to the other.
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