The Plane of the Lower Church

Local memory in Sremski Karlovci says this plane began life as a sapling carried in from Vienna, planted in the churchyard soon after the building beside it went up. The town's own mapping survey of its protected trees is more cautious, putting the age at around 165 years rather than the two centuries or more the Vienna story implies, and nobody has settled which figure is right. What both accounts agree on is the size. The tree now stands over 30 metres tall, which the region's Provincial Institute for Nature Protection calls unique for the species anywhere in Vojvodina, and it has carried state protection as a natural monument since 1960. It grows in the courtyard of the Lower Church, dedicated to the apostles Peter and Paul, in the old core of a small Danube town nine kilometres from Novi Sad. The church was built on foundations first recorded in 1599 and rebuilt in 1719, and it was here in 1784 that Petar I Petrović-Njegoš, later canonised as Saint Peter of Cetinje and ruler of Montenegro for nearly half a century, was ordained a bishop. The tree's heaviest limbs now rest on props, maintained by the town's own public utility company. Nobody has cored it to settle its age, so the plane keeps its two stories: a documented 165 years, and a longer one that only the tree itself could confirm.