Dąb Józef

This oak spent the 1930s in people's wallets. Józef Mehoffer drew it onto the reverse of Poland's 100-złoty note, issued in 1932 and again in 1934, where it stood for longevity and endurance. The tree carries the name Józef as well, though nothing in the record says whether either name led to the other. Wiśniowa tells a harder story about it too. By local account, two Jewish brothers, given as Paul and David Denholz, hid from the German occupation inside the oak's hollow trunk, in a shelter built on two levels, an upper one to watch the approach from and a lower one to disappear into, supplied by a village woman named Rozalia Proszak. That account is told in the village rather than held in an archive, and it should be read as the village telling it. The tree itself is 30 metres tall and 6.75 metres round, standing in the manor park at Wiśniowa, protected as a nature monument since 1954. Poland voted it Tree of the Year in 2016 and in 2017 it became the first Polish tree to win the European title. Its age is argued over: it is commonly called 650 years old, while a 1984 calculation by Cezary Pacyniak put it at about 416, which would make it roughly 450 now. Between 450 and 650, then, and the hollow is not going to settle it.