The Old Elm (Stariyat Bryast)

Bulgaria's central bank put this elm on a coin before anyone gave it a birth certificate. The 2018 ten-lev commemorative silver piece shows the same tree that stands today beside Sliven's town hall, a field elm whose age is usually given as about a thousand years, a figure repeated for generations rather than counted in rings. It has earned its fame honestly. In 2014 the tree won European Tree of the Year, taking 77,523 votes, more than any other entrant that year, and it has stood on Sliven's coat of arms since the 1990s. Ottoman-era accounts name it as a site where Bulgarian revolutionaries were executed, a harder history than a commemorative coin usually carries. The tree is not thriving. Dutch elm disease reached it around 2014, and a large dead crown was cut back in 2018; Bulgarian papers wrote it off more than once. What survives is two branches still growing near ground level, kept alive by specialists from the University of Forestry who monitor the trunk and reinforce its cavities. As of 2025, English-language sources describe the outlook as cautiously improving rather than lost. So the tree to see today is not the thousand-year giant on the coin. It is a much reduced, actively tended survivor standing exactly where that giant stood, in the middle of a working town square, free to walk up to any day of the week.