The Jan Stanko Oak

Lightning found this oak and it is still in leaf. The strike left it in poor structural condition, which is the surveyors' phrase and not a euphemism, and it went on growing: 554 centimetres round and 26 metres tall, the tallest of the four oaks on this page. It stands inside Park Szczytnicki near the narrowing of the park pond, a few minutes from the Hala Stulecia, Max Berg's concrete dome of 1913 that went on the UNESCO list in 2006 and drew the world's architects to this corner of the city. Unlike the other three, this tree was not protected in the 1953 batch. Its designation came on 2 April 1976, decision 26/76, twenty-three years later. It carries the name of Jan Stanko, the fifteenth-century physician and naturalist who compiled one of the earliest catalogues of Central European plants and animals, which is a fair patron for a tree in a park built as a botanical showpiece. No age estimate for it exists in any source found: the register that protects it records a species, a position and a date, and has no column for age or girth anywhere in it, so the girth and height here come from a dedicated survey of the island's monument trees.