Rudy is a village built around a former Cistercian abbey, and its own oak stands in the abbey's park. In October 2022 someone set it alight from inside its hollow trunk; an expert assessment the following year found it alive and recovering, 7.35 metres round. Sixteen kilometres away in Łubowice, a second oak carries the name of the poet Joseph von Eichendorff, born and christened close to where it still stands.
0 / 2 visités à Rudy
Photo : Marek Mroz (CC BY 4.0)
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Dab Cysters
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 450 to 500 years · Pocysterski Zespol Klasztorno-Palacowy park, Rudy
Someone set fire inside this oak's hollow trunk in October 2022, an act of vandalism reported to the police and confirmed by the Regional Directorate of State Forests in Katowice. A tomography scan followed, and by the summer of 2023 the professor who examined it called the tree in good condition, alive and holding.
The oak stands in the 95-hectare park that once belonged to the Cistercian abbey at Rudy, and locals call it Dab Cysters, the Cistercians' Oak. Its trunk measures 7.35 metres round, among the widest recorded in Upper Silesia, and estimates put its age between 400 and 550 years depending on which account you trust. A 1752 engraving by the German painter Johann Elias Ridinger already shows the abbey grounds with a tree standing roughly here, and an 1858 history of the monastery describes the oak by name.
King John III Sobieski is said to have stayed at the abbey in August 1683, on his way to relieve the siege of Vienna, though nothing ties that visit to this specific tree rather than the monastery itself.
Acorns from the oak have since been grown into hundreds of saplings planted across Poland, a small multiplication of a tree that was nearly burned out from the inside.
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The Eichendorff Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · about 300 years · Łubowice, gmina Rudnik, Racibórz County
The poet was christened in a wooden church that has since disappeared, next to an oak that has not. Joseph von Eichendorff, born in 1788 at the palace here in Łubowice, was baptised in a church that once stood near this tree. The church is gone. The palace is a ruin. The oak carries his name and still stands on the open ground by the village square.
Two Polish heritage sources agree on what it is and roughly how old: a pedunculate oak of about 300 years, they say, on dendrochronological calculation, so read it as a band of roughly 270 to 330 rather than a birthday. If that is right the tree was already seventy years old or so on the morning of the christening, and it has since watched the palace beside it fall into ruin and the region it stands in change country. It is a pomnik przyrody, a natural monument, which in Poland means nobody may fell it.
Eichendorff became one of the central poets of German Romanticism, and the village trades on him: the palace ruins, the park and a museum room devoted to him are all a short walk from the trunk.
Nobody has published a girth for this oak. If you get a tape around it, tell us.
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