Dab Cysters

Someone set fire inside this oak's hollow trunk in October 2022, an act of vandalism reported to the police and confirmed by the Regional Directorate of State Forests in Katowice. A tomography scan followed, and by the summer of 2023 the professor who examined it called the tree in good condition, alive and holding. The oak stands in the 95-hectare park that once belonged to the Cistercian abbey at Rudy, and locals call it Dab Cysters, the Cistercians' Oak. Its trunk measures 7.35 metres round, among the widest recorded in Upper Silesia, and estimates put its age between 400 and 550 years depending on which account you trust. A 1752 engraving by the German painter Johann Elias Ridinger already shows the abbey grounds with a tree standing roughly here, and an 1858 history of the monastery describes the oak by name. King John III Sobieski is said to have stayed at the abbey in August 1683, on his way to relieve the siege of Vienna, though nothing ties that visit to this specific tree rather than the monastery itself. Acorns from the oak have since been grown into hundreds of saplings planted across Poland, a small multiplication of a tree that was nearly burned out from the inside.