The Thousand-Year Linden of Faistenau

For nine days in the autumn of 1863, a preacher stepped out of the inside of this tree to speak. During the Jesuit mission of 25 October to 2 November, 19 of its 26 sermons were given from a pulpit built at the linden, the preacher climbing out of the hollow trunk on nine steps. Its hollow west limb is still called the Predigtstuhl, the pulpit. It began as a Tanzlinde, a dance linden, grown so that a round platform could be built into the crown and the village could dance in a ring up among the branches. The square around it was once a burnt clearing in the forest. A newly ordained priest said his first mass under it in 1900, the tree sits at the centre of Faistenau's coat of arms, and every three years the village stages its own Jedermann beneath it, most recently on summer weekends in 2025. Everyone calls it the thousand-year linden. That is a name, not a measurement. The province's register, which has protected the tree since 1933, says plainly that its true age cannot be determined, because the trunk is hollow and most of its annual rings are gone. Round the hollow stem it measured 9.10 metres in 2008, and 20.5 metres tall. Faistenau is about 14 km east of Salzburg, roughly forty minutes by regional bus. Whether the hollow can still be entered today, we have not been able to confirm.