1500 year old olive tree

When in Split you stand on the Peristyle and touch its columns or the sphinx that guards them, the realisation that you are touching history thousands of years old is incredible. Even more incredible is the realisation that there are living witnesses to the making of that history. One of them is the Old Olive Tree (Perišićeva mastrinka) in Kaštel Štafilić. The age of this silent witness of distant events is estimated at over 1500 years (some say even 1700), which places it among the oldest in the world.*

When you stand beneath its lush canopy, you feel fleeting and irrelevant. It is not uncommon on our islands to see old olive trees, but with this one in Štafilić you can see at a glance that it is no “ordinary” old olive tree. The realisation that it was already centuries old when the Croats arrived in these lands is fascinating. Most remarkably, it still produces olives from which oil is made to this day.

Here are a few interesting figures: its trunk has a circumference of 10.7 m, with the main section measuring 6.5 m. The crown is 22 m across, covering an area of about 130 m². The roots extend across a diameter of an incredible 100 m!!! The tree was declared a natural monument in 1990.

It would be lovely if this impressive tree stood somewhere out in the wild. Unfortunately, a settlement has grown up around it — but at least it has been left a meadow with enough room to keep spreading through the millennia still ahead of it. Perhaps then it will once again stand alone in solitude, full of memories that will forever remain untold.

* There is no precise method for determining the age of olive trees. Within just a few hundred years, trees lose the compactness of their trunk, which makes counting growth rings impossible. They often appear to be several separate trees, but DNA analysis shows that they are all parts of a single tree that has split apart over time. Trunk thickness is not a fully reliable indicator either, since growth rates depend on many factors. By and large, the oldest olive tree in Lebanon is thought to be as much as 6000 years old. After it come the olive tree in Israel (4–5000 years), one on Crete (3–5000 years), one on Sardinia (3–4000 years), and one in Portugal (around 3000 years). Beyond those, there are several olive trees over 2000 years old.

On Hvar near Jelsa there is reportedly a living olive tree 2500 years old, and in Lun on Pag there are living olive trees more than 1600 and 2000 years old. The olive tree in Kaštel Štafilić, with its estimated age of 1500–1700 years, belongs to this elite club of seniors and is one of the most beautiful we have seen! Find time to come and see it — it will wait for you as long as it takes 🙂