The Kopli Cemetery Park Oak

This oak was here before the graveyard, and it is still here after it. Tallinn's own park page says it had already grown there before the cemetery was laid out, and it has the age to match: about 350 years by the city's reckoning, 360 by the 2017 survey of Olev Abner, chief dendrologist at Tallinn Botanic Garden, who counts it among the city's five oldest trees. The first burial was on 16 October 1774. It is what is left of the Kopli tammik, the oak grove that covered this headland before anything was built on it. Soviet authorities closed the cemetery in 1950 and liquidated it into parkland the year after; the writer Eduard Bornhöhe, who had been buried here, was exhumed and reburied at Metsakalmistu on the far side of the city. The oak was left where it stood. Tallinn rebuilt the ground as a proper park between 2002 and 2006, and the children's playground went in beside the tree. Nobody has pinned it to a coordinate. Both sources place it by that playground, which the city locates opposite Pelguranna 13, and our pin marks the park rather than the trunk, so allow a few minutes of looking. The park's other trees of note, a white pine, alpine and Siberian stone pines and a weeping elm, were all planted after the burial ground was laid out. This one predates it.