The Dragon Oak of Lozorno

In 2023 only one tree in Europe drew more votes than this oak: Poland's Oak Fabrykant. The Dragon Oak of Lozorno took silver at the European Tree of the Year, second of seventeen with 18,198 votes, a year after winning Slovakia's national title. It is named for the way it looks, a silhouette Slovak writers compare to a dragon sitting down, with deeply scarred and gnarled bark. The trunk is nearly seven metres round, 677 centimetres by one report. Experts put it at around 700 years, an estimate rather than a ring count, so the honest band is 600 to 800. Its height depends on who you read: 18 metres in one account, 24 in another. The sources tie its long life to the building of nearby Pajstun Castle, to the Croatian merchants who later settled around Lozorno, and to a forest railway since abandoned. That railway's route is now the cycling and hiking trail that leads to it: park by the village reservoir and follow the asphalt forest road east into the Male Karpaty hills. Deer move through here, including rare white fallow deer, and beavers have come back to the nearby Suchy creek. The worry is timber. The contest page and other coverage from 2023 name logging in the surrounding forest as a threat. That coverage is the most recent we have found; if you have walked up since, tell us how it looks. The pin is approximate, so watch for the trail signs.