Seasons1 of 4
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.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Open farmland, Kybarčiai village, Kužių seniūnija, Šiauliai district, about 270m north of the Aukštelkė-Kuršėnai road (route 4004)
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.
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.
In Kybarčiai village, Šiauliai district; no public transport to the site, nearest city Šiauliai roughly 15km away, reachable by car
In fruit
September to October: acorns drop, and a good mast year buries the ground in them
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.
- In the official register: Saugomų teritorijų valstybės kadastras (STVK), no. 0310505010226
- lt.wikipedia.org
- arboristai.lt
- Lietuvos Respublikos saugomų teritorijų valstybės kadastras (STVK), gamtos paveldo objektai, botanical objects, no. 0310505010226