Peace Hill Oak

The oldest and thickest tree in Kaunas inherited the job from one that was burned down. The original Peace Hill Oak, about 800 years old and 6.7 metres round, was already failing from storm damage in 2001 when an arsonist got to it. The park left it standing to die rather than felling it, and in that same year the sculptor Juozas Šlivinskas set a metal cross-section of a trunk beside it, its rings marked with dates from Lithuanian history. A second arson attack in 2007 finished the old tree off and it was taken away. A sapling stands on its spot. The name and the role went, on 25 October 2001, to this oak: a neighbour of roughly 600 years, made a Kaunas natural monument on that date. It measures 5.15 metres round at chest height and 21 metres tall, which makes it the largest and oldest tree both in the city and in the Kaunas Lagoon Regional Park around it. It gets looked after like a listed building. Internal rot is the ongoing problem, so the trunk is treated and disinfected periodically, damaged openings are covered over and dead branches are cut out. You will find it beside the cycle path through the Pažaislis wood, between the reservoir shore and the Pažaislis monastery, eight or nine kilometres east of the centre.