The Vytogala Independence Oaks

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.