A small crucifix fixed to this oak marks the darkest local story in the Pays de Bitche: Swedish mercenaries are said to have hanged an entire hamlet's population from its branches during the Thirty Years' War, when the villagers would not reveal a hidden treasure. No contemporary record survives, only the tradition, but the war itself needed no invention: it emptied whole stretches of Lorraine. The oak stands twisted and storm-worn at the roadside, free, with nothing between you and the trunk.
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Photo : Didivo67 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Oak of the Swedes
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 400 to 500 years · Reyersviller, Pays de Bitche, Moselle
Somebody fixed a small crucifix to this oak, and the reason given for it is the darkest story in the Pays de Bitche. Local tradition holds that during the Thirty Years' War, in 1633 or 1634, Swedish mercenaries hanged the entire population of a nearby hamlet called Kirscheidt from its branches when the villagers would not say where a treasure was hidden. Kirscheidt no longer exists. Nor does any contemporary record of the hanging: the story is repeated locally and in regional history writing, and it stays tradition rather than documented event.
The war behind it needs no such caution. Fighting, famine and plague emptied whole stretches of Lorraine in those years, and villages that went then stayed gone.
The specialists who have walked out to the tree put it somewhere between 400 and 500 years old. Take the older end of that range and it was already a century old when the mercenaries came through. Take the younger and it was a sapling barely in the ground. It stands about 20 to 21 metres, though one visit in 2012 recorded 25, and nobody has published a girth. The silhouette is twisted and storm-worn, the shape an oak takes after several centuries alone in the open.
It is at the roadside between Reyersviller and Siersthal, free, with nothing between you and the trunk.
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