The Willow of Kupaly-Subislawa

Seven months ago this willow was still whole. On 29 December 2025, someone or something, fireworks testing has not been ruled out, set fire to the trunk of this 140-year-old white willow beside a pond in Oliwa, and the blaze burned out its core before neighbours spotted the flames and called the fire brigade. Firefighters put it out in time to save the tree next to it, a second protected willow believed to be around 165 years old, growing close enough that the fire could easily have spread. What was left standing had been hollowed out from the inside, its trunk statically unsafe, so the city's ecology department made the call foresters dread: cutting roughly four metres off the crown of a tree that had carried official protection since 2000, girth 495 centimetres, height 22 metres, just to keep it upright. The city filed a police report and the case remains open. What happens next genuinely is not settled. Botanists monitoring the tree say it may sprout new growth this season, though never at its old height again, and if it does not survive at all, Gdansk plans to leave the trunk standing anyway as deadwood habitat rather than remove it. For now it is alive, recovering by inches at a pond most of Oliwa walks past without knowing what stands there.