The Oak of Pencho Slaveykov

When the Slaveykov family moved from Plovdiv to Sofia after Bulgaria's 1878 liberation and bought a garden in what is now the Lozenets district, they got more than a plot of land. The garden held a surviving fragment of Kurubaglar, an old oak grove that had once covered a wide stretch of the area later swallowed by the city, and one of its oaks, later named for the poet Pencho Slaveykov, is reckoned by some accounts at more than 500 years old, old enough to have been standing through the entire span of Ottoman rule the 1878 liberation ended. A more conservative count of the garden's roughly 28 other trees puts their age nearer 300 years, itself old enough to make the plot one of Sofia's oldest continuously wooded pieces of ground. Pencho Slaveykov wrote some of his best known work in this garden, and it became a regular meeting place for the literary circle around the journal Misal, Bulgaria's most influential turn of the century intellectual gathering, whose members included the poet Peyo Yavorov and the critic Dr. Krastev. The site was declared a national cultural monument in 2005, though the park around the oak has since fallen into visible disrepair, its benches broken and its fountain dry, a contrast the tree itself seems entirely unbothered by.