What is the oldest tree in Krakow?

The Henryk Oak is the last living fragment of a pine-and-oak forest that once covered the village of Borek, on Krakow's southern edge, the same wood that gave the settlement its name (bor being an old Polish word for pine forest). It became a roadside tree in 1790, not long after Poland's first partition, when Austrian authorities drove the new highway from Vienna to Lwow directly through the old stand, leaving this one oak standing at the edge of what became one of the busiest streets in the district. For most of the 20th century, one man kept it that way: Henryk Bartyzel lived beside the tree from 1923 until 2010, intervening when occupation authorities ordered it felled during the Second World War and again through decades of routine road works that might otherwise have taken it out. A civic council named the tree in his honour the same year he died, and in 2017 a community project involving more than 90 volunteers restored the ground around its base and reopened it properly to the public. It represented Krakow for the first time in Poland's national Tree of the Year contest the following year.