Wiśniowa's oak spent the 1930s in people's wallets: Józef Mehoffer drew it onto the back of Poland's 100-złoty note. Dąb Józef won Poland's Tree of the Year in 2016 and became the first Polish tree to take the European title in 2017. Local memory holds a harder story too, of two brothers hidden inside its hollow trunk during the German occupation. It stands free to see in the historic manor park, argued over on age, 450 to 650 years, the way it is agreed on fame.
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Dąb Józef
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · several centuries; estimates disputed (roughly 450-650) · Wiśniowa village park
This oak spent the 1930s in people's wallets. Józef Mehoffer drew it onto the reverse of Poland's 100-złoty note, issued in 1932 and again in 1934, where it stood for longevity and endurance. The tree carries the name Józef as well, though nothing in the record says whether either name led to the other. Wiśniowa tells a harder story about it too. By local account, two Jewish brothers, given as Paul and David Denholz, hid from the German occupation inside the oak's hollow trunk, in a shelter built on two levels, an upper one to watch the approach from and a lower one to disappear into, supplied by a village woman named Rozalia Proszak. That account is told in the village rather than held in an archive, and it should be read as the village telling it. The tree itself is 30 metres tall and 6.75 metres round, standing in the manor park at Wiśniowa, protected as a nature monument since 1954. Poland voted it Tree of the Year in 2016 and in 2017 it became the first Polish tree to win the European title. Its age is argued over: it is commonly called 650 years old, while a 1984 calculation by Cezary Pacyniak put it at about 416, which would make it roughly 450 now. Between 450 and 650, then, and the hollow is not going to settle it.
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