The Lime Tree of Kopčany

The building beside this lime is the real headline. The Church of St Margaret of Antioch has been dated by both dendrochronology and radiocarbon analysis to the second half of the 10th century, roughly 925 CE, which makes it one of the oldest standing structures in Slovakia, a Great Moravian-era survivor now protected as a National Cultural Monument. The tree is younger by about seven centuries and has still been standing beside it for close to a tenth of the building's own life. Slovakia's arborist society measured the lime at 210 centimetres round and 20 metres tall when it won the national Tree of the Year vote in 2018, taking 9,526 votes, and the country put it forward for the European Tree of the Year the following year. It stands on a quiet meadow at the edge of Kopcany's territory near Skalica, the church and the tree together on open ground rather than fenced off from each other. Local sources like to say the two have protected each other and weathered more than two centuries side by side, a line that captures the pairing rather than a claim either has literally shielded the other. Nothing found says the lime has died or been felled since its award, and an arborist's own assessment is the evidence it was thriving as recently as 2018. Free to see, on foot from the village, no restriction.