Seasons1 of 4
Legend says this oak lost its top after Samogitia was Christianised in 1413 and its sacred oaks had their crowns cut. One version names the man who swung the axe, Mingėla, and has him drowning in the Minija afterwards. Another puts a Christian chapel in the severed crown. None of that is documented, and it is worth repeating anyway, because the tree really is crownless. It has stood hollow and topless for so long that its two sources cannot agree on how tall it is: 13 metres, or 16. They disagree on the waistline too. Lithuanian Wikipedia measures 8.1 metres at chest height, the arborists who worked on the tree about 7.7, and either figure puts it among the thickest oaks in the country. Estimates give it 600 to 700 years. The family who look after it are the family it is named for: five generations of Mingėlas on the land beside it. The state protected the oak in 1960 and raised it to nature monument in 2000. By then its trunk was plugged with concrete and strapped with metal bands, the tree surgery of another era. In 2010 the Lithuanian Arboristics Centre took all of that out, replaced it with gentler work, put up a fence and an information board, and grafted its acorns to raise successors. It ran as a candidate in Lithuania's 2024 Tree of the Year vote.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Vieštovės g. 3, Vieštovėnai village, Nausodis eldership, Plungė district, Lithuania, beside road 166 (Plungė-Vėžaičiai) near the Vieštovė stream, about 8km southwest of Plungė
You can recognise it as hollow and without a crown, its top long gone, still standing beside the road. It stands in Viestovenai village, beside road 166 near the Viestove stream.
Free, public. Stands beside a rural path/road near a homestead in Vieštovėnai village; a protective wooden fence and an information sign were installed in 2010 as part of a restoration by the Lithuanian Arboristics Centre. State-protected tree since 1960, raised to nature-monument status in 2000. Openly viewable and reachable from the road; no gate or ticket.
About 8km southwest of Plungė town centre, off state road 166 towards Vėžaičiai. No public transport recorded to the site itself; reachable by car or bicycle. This joins Plungė as a day-trip addition, not an in-town tree.
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.