The Hajdukova Murva (Hajduk's Mulberry)
Approximate location. Show us where it is
How do I find it? Seen over the fence from the pavement on Zrinsko-Frankopanska or Plinarska: the one old broad mulberry standing inside the sports ground rather than on the street side of it.
In 2015 a team from Zagreb's Faculty of Science took a DNA sample from an ailing mulberry tree in Split and cloned it 105 times, once for every year of HNK Hajduk Split's existence. The tree had stood in the courtyard of the club's first home, Stari plac, since before Hajduk itself existed, and every player who wore the checkerboard shirt between the club's founding in 1911 and its move to Poljud in 1979 walked past it on the way to training. Supporters kept coming back long after the club left: candles still turn up at its roots on the anniversaries of dead club legends, an unofficial shrine nobody organized and everybody understands. By 2014 the tree was ailing badly enough that the city's mayor stepped in personally to back a rescue, and the arborists who examined it put its age at around 120, close to two decades before the club it would outlive by a century was even founded. The clone count of 105 was symbolic, tied to the club's anniversary, but the genetics were real: each seedling carries the original's exact DNA, distributed around Split with the first planted ceremonially at the university campus in 2016. As far as anyone has documented, Hajduk remains the only football club anywhere with its own cloned tree.
- Species
- White Mulberry (Morus alba)
- Location
- Stari plac (former HNK Hajduk stadium grounds), Zrinsko-Frankopanska ulica, Split (Lučac-Manuš)
- Access
- View-only, and free. The mulberry stands inside the grounds RK Nada uses at the old Stari plac ground, so you do not walk up to the trunk. It is in clear view from the public pavement on Zrinsko-Frankopanska and from Plinarska, which is where this page sends you.
- Getting there
- Lučac-Manuš district; about a 20 minute walk from the Riva
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Sources
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