Vytogala is a village in the Silale district with one thing to stand in front of: four oaks around a memorial stone, on the ground where Stasys Girenas was born in 1893. Girenas and Steponas Darius flew the Lituanica out of New York in 1933 and died in a crash short of Lithuania, and that flight is still a national story here. Three of the oaks were planted in 1928 for the tenth anniversary of independence, the fourth in 1989. They stand at the roadside, free, about nine kilometres from Silale.
0 of 1 visited in Vytogala
1
The Vytogala Independence Oaks
Oak (Quercus sp.) · about 100 years (three of the four); the fourth is younger · Vytogala
Five years after three of these oaks went into the ground, the man born on this spot flew a single-engine plane out of New York and never arrived. Stasys Girenas and Steponas Darius crossed the Atlantic in the Lituanica in July 1933 and came down in a forest near Soldin, a few hundred kilometres short of Kaunas. In Lithuanian memory that flight sits roughly where Lindbergh's sits in American memory. Girenas was born here in 1893, on this roadside in Vytogala.
The trees went in in 1928, for the tenth anniversary of Lithuanian independence, beside a wooden cross. The Soviet authorities took the cross down. A memorial stone replaced it in 1969, the cross came back in 1990, and the oaks have stood around both ever since. Only three of the four are originals. The fourth was planted in 1989 to replace one that had died, so this is not an even-aged row but three trees approaching a century and one sixty-one years younger.
Nobody comes for the timber. The two anyone has measured are 1.55 and 1.22 metres round, ordinary for an oak. Silale district put the group under protection in 2006 with a zone of 300 square metres, which is about the size of the thing: four trees, one stone, and the story Lithuania tells about the summer of 1933.
Read more and get directions →