What is the oldest tree in Liškiava?
The Liškiava Lime, locally called Paklėštarės liepa, a multi-stemmed small-leaved lime at the foot of the Liškiava hillfort. An arborist assessment dates it to over 400 years. It is the only tree mapped here, published alone under the single-tree exception.
Lightning once split the tree's main trunk roughly in half; a 2014 arborist assessment dated the break to about two decades earlier and put the tree's age at over 400 years. Since the strike, dense clonal shoots have grown up around the mother stem, giving the tree the wide, topless silhouette that the naturalist Henrikas Gudavičius described as looking like it has no clear trunk at all. No height is recorded, because there is no clear top to measure to. Before the Second World War, a small roadside shrine holding an image of the Virgin Mary was nailed to the trunk, and travellers passing by would stop and bow; it was removed during the Soviet period. The tree stands on a stepped slope beside a viewing platform, looking across at the Krūčius river bridge and up at Liškiava's Holy Trinity Church and monastery on the hilltop above, a well-known destination in its own right that most visitors combine with the tree below it.
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