The Lazdynai Linden

Lazdynai is a housing estate that won a Lenin Prize. Built from 1974 by architects Vytautas Cekanauskas and Vytautas Bredikis, its blocks were fitted around the hills and forest rather than the other way round, and the Soviet Union's own architecture establishment held it up as a model of how a modern district could keep its ground. Most of what got kept was the pine forest. This linden is what got protected inside it. It stands in the Bukciai woods, in the bend the Neris river makes at the southern edge of the district, which puts it on the wilder side of an estate built to look wild on purpose. Vilnius listed it as a natural heritage object, one small-leaved linden among the district's preserved stands, without recording an address more specific than the forest itself, and without dating it. A linden growing wild in a river-bend wood ages differently from one planted in a courtyard, slower and less watched, which is probably why nobody wrote its age down. If you have stood under it and can say how thick the trunk is, or roughly how tall, tell us. The forest around it has outlasted the Soviet Union; the tree, going by the wood it grows in, may have been there before either.