Taras Shevchenko sat beneath this ancient oak

Specialists at the Kyiv Ecological and Cultural Center say that they came across the city’s oldest oak tree (600 years old) by pure chance. “Just across the road here is the house of the famous forester, Klister. There are three centuries-old beech trees growing there, which is rather unusual for our climatic conditions,” they say.

The Klister oak, as environmentalists call it, is almost 30 meters high. “We didn’t have to saw the tree down and count the rings on the stump to determine its age,” Volodymyr Boreiko, director of the Kyiv Ecological and Cultural Center, said jokingly. “All you have to do is measure the circumference and multiply it by 100. So a circumference of six meters is 600 years.”

For a long time a garbage can stood under the oak, where Taras Shevchenko could have relaxed whenever he came to visit his forester friend, Klister. “It was just horrible,” local resident Valentyna Altukhova recalls. “The garbage was always burning, although children played here and people walked their dogs.”

Now the Klister oak has been put on the list of Ukraine’s natural heritage, and it is now under state protection. Environmentalists are glad that no one can chop it down now. “This happens a lot. Some workers come from the Zelenbud (Greenery Department), write up a report on a tree’s condition, and then cut it down,” Boreiko says.

The bark of the Klister oak was burned and stripped, so the ecologists applied a special cement-based solution to it. They say this can extend the oak’s life by at least 200 to 300 years. But environmental experts think it is more important for people to understand that this is society’s treasure and a piece of living history that should be treated with respect.

“A few years ago they cut down the Buial oak for no apparent reason. The Nazis shot a Red Army soldier named Buial under this tree,” Boreiko says. “Unfortunately, things like this happen all too often.” Everyone has a personal interest in trees: builders want a tree-free construction site, while businessmen want commercial gain. For example, the Klister oak could be turned into good, expensive timber.

There are 39 protected trees, mostly oaks, in Kyiv and about 200 in Ukraine. “Many of them need treatment and care,” Boreiko complains. “It is common practice in other countries to treat trees instead of cutting them down, which saves money. This is the first action of this kind in Ukraine.” Environmentalists have already examined about 20 trees and rehabilitated a few of them. Fortunately, this year the municipal budget allocated about 20,000 hryvnias to treat “botanical monuments.”