Helena the Poplar (Topola Helena)

Hel's best-loved tree survived a storm that killed its twin, and got a name-day party out of it. This black poplar has stood at a street corner in the middle of town since around the early 19th century, roughly 220 years old, 30 metres tall and just over four metres round. It once grew beside a second poplar of the same age. When that twin fell in a windstorm, the town's woodcarvers turned its trunk into a sculpture of fishermen hauling in their nets, which still stands near Helena today, a monument to the tree that did not make it. The Gdańsk provincial council protected it as a natural monument in 1973, but it only got its name decades later. In 2017 it won Poland's national Tree of the Year competition as Helena, named for Helena Przybyszewska, said to be the wife of the naval commander who led the thirty-two day defence of the Hel Peninsula in September 1939. The town has celebrated its name day every 22 May since, with a street party built around a tree. It stands free to see on a public corner where ul. Bałtycka meets ul. Wiejska and ul. Kuracyjna, a short walk from the narrow-gauge railway that ends its line in Hel.