The Beech of Ludolfino

An opera singer's wife gave her name to this park, and this beech has outgrown every owner who has held it since. Ludolfino takes its name from Dorothea Ludolphine Bachmann-Ackermann, wife of the singer who first carved this estate out of the neighbouring Stawowie grounds in the late 18th century; the property shows up on city maps as early as 1822. It changed hands repeatedly after that, the Braune family from 1877, a private owner named Robert von Kolkow from 1922, an Evangelical religious order that ran it as a deaconess house from 1933, and the Polish state from 1957, before landing with Gdansk's physical education academy, AWFiS, which now uses the old manor as its main library. This common beech has been protected as a natural monument since 1988, its trunk 470 centimetres around and its crown 24 metres tall, growing on ground that has technically never once belonged to the tree itself. Students studying inside the converted manor now walk past it without necessarily knowing they are passing something that predates every institution that has ever owned the land beneath it.