The village of Peruc may be named after a load of washing. The Chronicle of Dalimil tells how Prince Oldřich, a Přemyslid ruler of Bohemia, came upon a young woman named Božena doing laundry by the stream here around 1002, fell for her and married her. Their son became Duke Břetislav I, and "perouc prádlo", washing the linen, is the village's favourite explanation of its own name. Tradition puts the meeting beneath this oak. Whether this is that oak is the open question. It is usually given as roughly a thousand years old, which would make it the tree from the chronicle. Some foresters and experts think otherwise: that the original oak died long ago and the legend passed to a younger successor. Nobody has settled it, so the honest range runs from about 300 years to a thousand. What is not in dispute is the size. It is a pedunculate oak 31 metres tall with a trunk 7.6 metres round, and it came through two fires, in 1993 and 1995. It is a protected memorial tree, stands by the stream at the edge of the village with a bench for visitors, and a forest kindergarten now shares its corner of Peruc. In 2025 it was voted the Czech Republic's Tree of the Year, and in 2026 it placed seventh in Europe. Whichever tree the prince stood under, this is the one the village has chosen to remember him by.
Oldřichova 49, 439 07 Peruc, Ústí nad Labem Region, Czechia (Dolní Poohří area) You can recognise it by its height, 31 metres, over a trunk 7.6 metres round, with a visitors' bench beside it. It stands by the stream at the edge of Peruc, at Oldřichova 49, near the forest kindergarten.
Free, a legally protected 'památný strom' (memorial tree) beside a stream at the edge of the village, with a bench for visitors; kudyznudy.cz (the Czech national tourism board's own site) treats it as an established, freely visitable destination with no restrictions mentioned.
Peruc is a village in the Louny district, Usti nad Labem region; no rail station in the village, reached by road, roughly 65km northwest of Prague and about 15km from Louny.