The Henryk Oak

This oak is named after the man who spent decades making sure it did not get cut down, not after anyone who planted it. Henryk Bartyzel, who lived beside the tree from 1923 until his death in 2010, is the reason it survived a felling order from wartime occupation authorities and decades of routine maintenance on what became one of Krakow's busiest streets. The oak itself predates him by more than a century. It is the last survivor of the pine-and-oak forest that once covered the former village of Borek, the same wood that gave the village its name, bor being an old Polish word for pine forest, and it became a roadside tree almost by accident in 1790, when Austrian authorities cut the Vienna-to-Lwow highway straight through the ancient stand shortly after Poland's first partition. Everything else that forest once held is gone; only this oak, now around 240 to 250 years past that road-building, is left standing at its edge. In 2010, a civic council formally named it Henryk in Bartyzel's honour, and in 2017 a community restoration project reopened its surroundings after more than 90 volunteers cleared and replanted the ground around its base. It competed, as Krakow's first entrant, in Poland's national Tree of the Year contest in 2018.