Kybarčiai Oak
How do I find it? You can recognise it by its hollow, burned-out trunk, roomy enough to walk into, now standing as two separate halves after the trunk split. It stands alone in open farmland near Kybarciai, 270m from the road.
A grown adult can walk into this oak. The trunk is hollow and burned out inside, and the local story is that a demon shelters in the cavity when Perkūnas, the thunder god, is throwing lightning about. What is left outside the hole is still enormous. Its own dedicated sources put the girth at 8.40 metres at chest height, which places it among the thickest oaks in Lithuania; another Lithuanian reference, comparing the country giants, lists it at 8.10 metres instead. Nobody has reconciled the two. The state register notes that before the trunk split and the rot got in, it may have measured anywhere from 8.4 to 9.5 metres round. Today it stands as two halves, one of them still leafing out every spring. It is also called the Rusteikai Oak, after the noble family who lived beside it for generations and whose brick burial chapel still stands nearby. The state register estimates its age at 500 to 700 years, a deliberately wide band, and Lithuanian arborists have written that it may be a contemporary of the famous Stelmužė Oak. Antanas Krištopaitis painted it in watercolour in 2000. It was entered as a candidate in Lithuania's 2025 Tree of the Year vote. It has been a protected natural heritage object since October 2013. It stands alone in open farmland, 270 metres from the road, with no marked path to it.
- Species
- Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur)
- Girth
- 8.4 m
- Location
- Open farmland, Kybarčiai village, Kužių seniūnija, Šiauliai district, about 270m north of the Aukštelkė-Kuršėnai road (route 4004) (Kybarčiai)
- Access
- Free, standing alone amid open cultivated fields about 270m from a paved secondary road (route 4004); no fee or gate mentioned by any source and nothing states it is on posted private land, but there is no marked path either, an unpaved field track is the likely approach. Worth a reader confirming the exact walk-in.
- Getting there
- In Kybarčiai village, Šiauliai district; no public transport to the site, nearest city Šiauliai roughly 15km away, reachable by car
The button above opens directions in your maps app.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
Discover more
Ticking this one off, walks past several more, and your collection growing city by city: that is the Ancient Trees app.
Get the appThis page was researched from a distance. If you know this tree, you know things we do not: the species, the age, the size, whether the photo shows the right tree, or that it is gone. Every field on this page can be corrected.
Correct a detail on this pageSuggest another tree