The Hungarian Oak of Italska Street
How do I find it? You can recognise it by its 2.91-metre trunk on the open lawn of a hospital garden. It stands in the grounds of the Italska Street clinic, near the entrance from Helenska.
This oak reached Italska Street before the hospital did. Quercus frainetto is a Balkan and southeast European tree rather than a Czech one, and this specimen went in with the original garden landscaping of the ground above the main railway station's tracks, well before the building it now shares a lawn with was put up. Both sources measure it at 291 centimetres round, from a survey in 2013. Its age is the part that will not settle. The national register, quoted by Czech Wikipedia, gives about 140 years as of 2019. The Agentura Koniklec survey behind prazskestromy.cz says nearer 155. Read together that puts the tree somewhere between 145 and 170 years old, and nobody has offered anything to close the gap. Prague listed it as a pamatny strom, a protected memorial tree, on 7 March 1998, and the state's assessors rate its condition very good. It is not the largest Hungarian oak in the city. Another registered one at Palata stands 24 metres tall with 335 centimetres of trunk, so this tree holds second place in a field of two. It grows in the grounds of the Italska Street clinic, the former Railway Hospital, near the entrance from Helenska. The ground is not gated off during clinic hours, the same open institutional lawn as any hospital garden.
- Species
- Hungarian Oak (Quercus frainetto)
- Girth
- 2.91 m
- Location
- Grounds of the Italska Street clinic (Poliklinika AGEL, formerly the Railway Hospital), entrance from Helenska street, 120 00 Praha 2 (Vinohrady)
- Access
- Free; stands in the grounds of a public health clinic (Poliklinika AGEL, formerly the Zeleznicni/Railway Hospital) near its main entrance from Helenska street, the same kind of openly walkable institutional ground as a hospital garden. Not gated off from the public during opening hours.
- Getting there
- Bus 135 to Na Smetance, or an 8 min walk from Muzeum metro (lines A, C)
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Sources
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