What is the oldest tree in Volkenroda?
The Koenigseiche, also called the Dicke Eiche (thick oak), on open ground at the edge of Volkenroda. Its girth of 9.8 metres makes it one of the thickest oaks recorded anywhere in Germany. It is the only tree mapped here, published alone under the single-tree exception.
The Koenigseiche's nickname, Tausendjährige Eiche, promises a thousand years, and the tree's own register calls that an exaggeration. A 1992 core sample combined with 19th-century circumference records instead puts the real age at roughly 500 to 600 years, which is still old enough to have stood through the working life of the nearby Cistercian monastery, Kloster Volkenroda. Sources disagree on whether that connection reaches back to the 10th or the 12th century; either way, this is thought to be a relic of the wood pasture the monks once kept here, a single survivor of a managed grazing landscape that has otherwise disappeared. Its girth was last measured at 9.8 metres in June 2019, making it one of the thickest oaks recorded in Germany. A lightning strike in 1989 broke a main branch, and the exposed wood inside is what let dendrologists read its age directly rather than estimate it from girth alone. Conservation work happened in 1955 and 1991; both times, a note was left in a bottle sealed inside the tree. It carries Germany's Naturdenkmal (natural monument) protection and is registered as a Baumveteran. It was last checked as vital in September 2022.
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