The Old Town's Only Oak

The Old Town has exactly one legally protected oak and it grows on a corner nobody photographs. Rasnovka is a scrap of a square in the north of the Old Town behind the Convent of Saint Agnes, with the early Gothic church of the Holy Saviour on one side and the functionalist offices of the city's road authority on the other. The oak stands between them, planted around 1850, when this quarter was still mills, timber yards and river trade rather than a conservation area. It is a pedunculate oak, the ordinary Czech oak of field boundaries and village greens, doing the unusual thing of reaching 19 metres in the middle of a city block, and its trunk has gone from 299 centimetres in 2010 to 321 in 2017. Prague protected it on 24 March 2001, and the last survey found no damage worth recording. It is about six centuries younger than the church beside it and eighty years older than the office block, which is a fair summary of what it is doing there: the one living thing on the square that watched both of its neighbours turn up.