Kybarciai maps one tree: a hollow oak standing alone in open farmland, thick enough that a grown adult can walk into its trunk. Local legend has a demon sheltering in the cavity when the thunder god Perkunas is at work overhead. Among the thickest oaks in Lithuania and possibly a contemporary of the country's most famous one. Published alone here because the tree is the destination, not because Kybarciai's research is finished.
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Foto: Vilensija (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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Kybarčiai Oak
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · roughly 500-700 years · Kybarčiai
A grown adult can walk into this oak. The trunk is hollow and burned out inside, and the local story is that a demon shelters in the cavity when Perkūnas, the thunder god, is throwing lightning about.
What is left outside the hole is still enormous. Its own dedicated sources put the girth at 8.40 metres at chest height, which places it among the thickest oaks in Lithuania; another Lithuanian reference, comparing the country giants, lists it at 8.10 metres instead. Nobody has reconciled the two. The state register notes that before the trunk split and the rot got in, it may have measured anywhere from 8.4 to 9.5 metres round. Today it stands as two halves, one of them still leafing out every spring.
It is also called the Rusteikai Oak, after the noble family who lived beside it for generations and whose brick burial chapel still stands nearby. The state register estimates its age at 500 to 700 years, a deliberately wide band, and Lithuanian arborists have written that it may be a contemporary of the famous Stelmužė Oak.
Antanas Krištopaitis painted it in watercolour in 2000. It was entered as a candidate in Lithuania's 2025 Tree of the Year vote. It has been a protected natural heritage object since October 2013.
It stands alone in open farmland, 270 metres from the road, with no marked path to it.
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