The Oldest Oak of Vilnius

This oak lost roughly eighty percent of its root system and is still alive. The damage was done slowly and out of sight, by construction and transformer works beside it, and only became clear when Bernardinai Garden was overhauled in 2012. The rescue was blunt. Arborists took some twenty tonnes of weight out of the crown so the roots still working could carry what was left, then cleaned and treated the cavities in the trunk. Fourteen years later it is still the tree the city points people towards. Its official entry does not bother with a name. It is listed simply as Seniausias ąžuolas, the oldest oak, protected as a municipal heritage object since 29 May 1996, with a trunk about five metres round. The sources put it at over four hundred years and none of them says how that figure was arrived at, so read it as the received number rather than a measurement. It stands at the southern end of the garden, close to the footbridge over the Vilnia, which puts it a few minutes from Cathedral Square and a few steps from Užupis. Three more protected trees stand within a few hundred metres of it, so this is a stop on a walk rather than a destination on its own.