The Zagradski Plane (Zagradski Chinar)
Two plane trees stand opposite the church of St. George in Garmen, and the famous one is the older of the pair. The Zagradski Plane took second place in European Tree of the Year 2011 with 18,374 votes, a year after winning Bulgaria's national contest, and it appears on the municipality's coat of arms. It is 24 metres tall and 10.46 metres round. How old it is depends on who you ask: the contest and a Bulgarian tourist guide say more than 600 years, while Bulgarian Wikipedia gives about 650, from a 1968 survey estimate. Even the year it became protected is disputed, 1961 in one source and 1968 in two others. Somewhere between 550 and 700 years covers every reading. The same 1968 survey put the tree beside it at around 300. Together they are the Zagrade planes, standing in what was once a separate village and is now a quarter of Garmen, on the road from Gotse Delchev to Marchevo. The legend is better than the paperwork. Ottoman janissaries are said to have set the tree alight to punish a villager who warned others that the water had been poisoned, and the villagers put the fire out, leaving a scar. Nobody has documented it. What is documented is the use: weddings and village gatherings under the crown, storks roosting in season, and in 2017 a Rotary Club project that turned the ground around the two trees into an open-air museum.
Zagrade quarter of Garmen, opposite St. George's Church, on the road from Gotse Delchev to Marchevo, Blagoevgrad region, Bulgaria You can recognise it by the trunk, 10.46 metres round and far thicker than the younger plane beside it. It stands on the Gotse Delchev to Marchevo road, directly opposite St. George's Church in the Zagrade quarter.
Free, standing on open ground in the Zagrade quarter of the village, opposite the church
Garmen village, on the Gotse Delchev to Marchevo road; no rail, nearest reasonable public transport is the intercity bus to Gotse Delchev, then local onward transport