A 1982 core sample counted 1,637 rings in this oak, dating its germination to around the year 345 and making it Bulgaria's oldest tree with a scientific reading behind the number. Its record size, a 7.45-metre girth and a crown once over 1,000 square metres, is mostly history: a 1969 storm and falling groundwater have left only one branch alive, confirmed still greening every spring as recently as 2024. It stands free and open in Granit village.
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The Granit Oak (Granitski dab)
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · about 1,680 years · Granit village
A forester's core sample in 1982 counted 1,637 rings in this oak, which puts its germination around 345, in the twilight of the Roman Balkans, and makes it Bulgaria's oldest recorded tree. Four decades on, add the years since the boring, and the count runs to around 1,680.
Its full-grown record is remarkable: 7.45 metres of girth, a crown that once spread over 1,000 square metres, 23 metres of height. Most of that is history now. A storm in 1969 took its largest branch, and the tree has been losing ground ever since, plainly to falling groundwater around the village rather than to any single event. Repairs went in during 1983, concrete and wire holding weight the trunk could no longer carry on its own, and by 2018 only a single branch was still alive.
That one branch still leafs out every spring, confirmed as recently as 2024, which is why the tree remains a living, visitable specimen rather than a memorial to one. It has stood as a declared natural monument since 1967 and carries entry 388 in Bulgaria's Century-Old Trees Registry. What you meet today is not the tree at its record size but the tree at the end of a long fight to stay alive at all, worth seeing for exactly that reason.
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