The Judas Tree of Mélykút Church Hill

A Mediterranean tree has been growing on the cold north side of a church on the Great Hungarian Plain for about 250 years. The Hungarian news site Index called it a minor miracle, and that is not much of an exaggeration. The Judas tree belongs to warm, dry hillsides much further south. This one stands on church hill in Mélykút, in the geometric centre of a town of about 5,000, beside the church the Grassalkovich family built. Index dates it to the 1760s or 1770s and writes that the seed was probably brought by Franciscan monks from Szabadka, today Subotica, who served in the town. The probably is theirs. Nobody has taken a tape measure or a core to it, so the age rests on that story. The name carries its own folklore. The flowers, which break out along the bare branches in spring, are read as the blood of Christ, and the flat seed pods that follow as Judas's silver. The town treats the church grounds as a place to sit and to play, and the tree as its own. In 2020 it won Hungary's Tree of the Year with 5,091 votes, out of a record 20,464 cast, and in 2021 it came eighth in Europe. That spring the town held events beneath it. If you have measured its trunk, tell us. Nobody has published a girth yet.