The Old Mulberry of Veliki Preslav

By local tradition, the revolutionary Stefan Karadzha once hid from the Ottoman authorities in a pub beside this mulberry. The tree has been keeping that kind of company for a long time. It is a white mulberry, roughly 450 years old by the estimate two Bulgarian outlets repeat, and it grows in the public garden with the fountain in the centre of Veliki Preslav. That makes it older than any of the stories told about it, and the town has attached a good number. Tradition links it to Vasil Levski, the revolutionary most Bulgarians would name first. In 1900 the writer Ivan Vazov is said to have met the townspeople at a cafe under its branches. None of it can be checked against a record, and all of it tells you what the tree is to Preslav: the place where people meet. That is still what it does. The garden around it, fountain and all, is where the town gathers. In 2020 it won Bulgaria's Tree with Roots contest, and in 2021 it went on to European Tree of the Year, where 30,055 votes placed it fourteenth. Nobody has published a girth or a height for it, and our pin marks the garden rather than the trunk, so expect to look around the square for it. If you have stood under it with a tape measure, tell us how big it is.