The felled tree: decoding the destruction

The deliberate felling of an iconic tree is a story that author Theodore Brun had heard somewhere before, prompting him to explore the reactions to it further.

Theodore Brun

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles. He previously studied Dark Age archaeology at Cambridge, and afterwards worked in international law.

A felled decidious tree lies sprawled on the ground. The freshly sawn stump and roots are in the foreground

The stump of the felled sycamore tree.

Wandering wounder, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

News of the felling of the Sycamore Gap Tree was greeted across the country with shock, sadness and disgust. Shock at the wanton vandalism; sadness at the loss of an iconic feature of our British Isles; disgust at the kind of nihilism it must have taken in the mind of whoever did the deed. Predictably social media blew up. I blew up with it. This was ‘our’ tree - held which such affection by those of us who knew it across the nation as to be almost sacred. The spiteful disregard for that affection felt truly shocking.

The most natural reaction to this is anger. “Throw the book at whoever did it!’ was the general feeling - whether it was the 16-year-old boy first arrested or the 60-year-old man detained later. No motive could justify such a mindless act.

But then came the double shock for me. A jarring recollection that it was the story of the felling of another great tree that had been the seed of inspiration from which grew my entire historical fiction series, The Wanderer Chronicles. And in that story, the man doing the felling seemed to me something of a hero. The tree in question was a mighty oak, dedicated to Donar (better known as Thor) the god of thunder, which once stood in the province of Hesse in central Germany. In the early 8th century, an English missionary, known to history as St Boniface, took an axe to Donar’s Oak, a sacred place of worship to the local pagan inhabitants, even as a large crowd of them stood by raining curses on his head. Boniface would have justified his act of vandalism on religious grounds: the tree was the site of horrific human sacrifice and rituals of witchcraft, and must be destroyed, in part to prove the impotence of this pagan god.

Shocking as his act must have been, Boniface’s aim was not to offend. It was to overthrow. To overthrow a system of religious and spiritual oppression. A system of cruelty, death and bondage. In a sense, it was an act of expulsion of false gods who demanded everything and promised nothing in return. That would have been his justification, at least. And in its place, he intended to plant a new culture of faith, freedom and forgiveness; of truth and love. It’s telling that he used the timber from the fallen oak to build a church.

The event marked the beginning of the widespread destruction of many sacred groves and other places of pagan worship in the decades that followed, symbolic of the supplanting of one pre-existing culture by another, more powerful culture on the rise.

So, can Boniface’s good intentions be distinguished from the apparently nihilistic felling of the Sycamore Gap Tree in our own day? I think they can. But no doubt many would disagree.

After all, these days, we find the idea of one culture asserting itself over another almost as abhorrent as the human sacrifice Boniface was trying to suppress. Certainly, to post-modern sensibilities and values, religious motivations no longer justify any kind of cultural vandalism. Few would have much sympathy for the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. Nor for the deliberate arson attacks in the mid-nineties on over fifty churches in Norway by neo-pagan Black Metal bands. Even today, the demolition of a Palestinian mosque by Israeli shells as an act of retaliation attracts media opprobrium, no matter the human death toll that provoked it.

So, is there any good for which vandalism may be justified?

In a world and culture that feel ever more divided, perhaps the Sycamore Gap Tree, even in its destruction, can give us some hope, some fleeting moment of cultural unity.

The protest actions of environmental groups like Just Stop Oil or Extinction Rebellion fall into that vein, and strongly divide opinion. They proclaim a new gospel of environmentalism. Turn around, mend your ways, and be saved. (Although is it really just an old message of paganism: Appease the gods of sun and thunder or else face oblivion?) In any case, it’s a message burning with no less zeal than did old Boniface’s. And while they may not agree with their methods, many would at least agree with their cause and motive. The question is: how far can you stretch a point?

The fact is that there is much that we do not agree on. Borders, taxation, healthcare, education, marriage, sex and gender, even what constitutes a human life. Cultural divisions seem to grow only wider. Increasing mistrust has us standing in opposition to one another - vitriol and disdain filling the space between us. Two tribes in a stand-off. Rather like the two hills that form the gap where that beautiful tree stood until last week. The gap is empty now. The tree is what brought them together. The tree was what completed the whole scene. Without it, we see only the empty air between the two opposing hills.

In a world and culture that feel ever more divided, perhaps the Sycamore Gap Tree, even in its destruction, can give us some hope, some fleeting moment of cultural unity. Trees still represent to us an essential good. Their existence transcends the passage of our short lives. They stand through storm or shine. They sink their roots deep into the good earth. They stretch their limbs up to the skies. They are a metaphor for a life well lived.

The felling of this iconic and beautiful tree is a pang we can all feel, the more so because it seems to have been done as a naked act of vandalism with - so far - no justification offered. Maybe this then is its greatest legacy: that, rather than reaching for the easy emotions of anger and blame, we can transcend our differences for just a moment. And allow ourselves to be reminded that, more than we ever realised, we loved that old tree. And we shall miss it now it’s gone.

If we can all feel that, perhaps there’s hope for us yet.

The Sycamore Gap Tree as was.

A black and white photo show a single mature tree silhouetted in the gap between two hills..

Article

Culture

War & peace

21 March 2024

4 min read

Letter from the Balkans

An audience with a crown prince tells the story of troubled lands and resilient inhabitants.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

An orthodox cathedral, with prominent roof domes.

St Sava Cathedral, Belgrade.

Ben Asyö on Unsplash.

It’s only halfway through our supper by Stone Gate, the most ancient entrance to the old citadel of Zagreb, Croatia’s capital, that we realise votive candles are burning in the archway outside. Closer inspection reveals three or four simple pews before a niche shrine to Our Lady and the stone walls covered with inscriptions to the local deceased.

Families, young and old but mostly young, gather in the gloaming for their dear departed. This is a profoundly Catholic site and the little restaurant, brightly lit and jolly, nevertheless feels reverential and on holy ground. Some 80 per cent of the population of Croatia is Roman Catholic, while just 3.3 per cent are Serbian Orthodox.

A five-and-a-half-hour bus ride east and we’re in Belgrade, capital of Serbia. Here, the proportions of the faithful are almost exactly reversed – 81 per cent are Orthodox and a little under four per cent Catholic.

These statistics serve as a grim reminder of the phrase that entered our political lexicon in the first half of the 1990s: Ethnic cleansing. In that civil war, as the former Yugoslavia broke up into its constituent republics, Croatian Serbs and Serbian Catholics – those who survived, that is – were displaced.

So we’re less likely to see the kind of Marian devotion that we witnessed in Zagreb being honoured in Belgrade. This is essentially a technical, creedal difference between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, in how the incarnation of the Son proceeds from the Holy Spirit. It’s no big deal theologically and shouldn’t detain us. But it quietly points to the fragility of peace, not to say democracy, in the Balkans.

A fresco of the Christ in its dome has a bullet hole through the forehead, not so much crucified as assassinated.

A mural depicts an icon of Christ with a bullet hole in his forehead.

HRH Crown Prince Alexander, head of the Royal family Karadjorjdevic, which ruled the kingdoms of Serbia and (later) Yugoslavia until the Second World War, carefully refers to it as “democracy at midnight” over coffee in the Blue Room of Belgrade’s Royal Palace. He returned to his ancestral home when Slobodan Milosevic was deposed at the millennium.

The Crown Prince helped his country return to democracy by uniting the opposition which defeated Milosevic in the elections of 2000. Even today, he calmly states that western democratic leaders often fail to understand how the mindset of eastern autocracy works and agrees that it is “work in progress”. Eternal vigilance is key.

In this context, the Serbian Orthodox Church is doing well, but it’s also still work in progress. Under communism, a substantial number of Serbian bishops were appointed by the Soviet regime, for purposes of control and information gathering. That culture wasn’t cleansed overnight, nor has the communist legacy been entirely expunged from the Church.

“You’ll see what I mean when you visit our family chapel in a moment,” the Crown Prince tells me. Sure enough, a fresco of the Christ in its dome has a bullet hole through the forehead, not so much crucified as assassinated. Prince Alexander will not restore it, so its serves as a constant reminder of what can be. His guiding principle is that “only dictators alter history.”

Elsewhere, our guide points to desecrated icons and the ghostly shadows of Soviet insignia on marble pillars. Alexander is an unassuming and modest man, referring to the 18 Serbian parties he convened at a conference in 2000 as “the democracy by email”.

When we’re joined by his wife, Crown Princess Katherine, she corrects this, proudly stating that her husband returned democracy to the region. There is probably some truth in both their versions of events. The consequence of that could be a restoration of a constitutional parliamentary monarchy in Serbia – we’ll see, or perhaps our successors will.

From the Palace, we visit St Sava, called a temple but really the Serbian Orthodox cathedral consecrated to the memory of the founder of the national Church. This, again, is work in progress. Started in 1935 and only now approaching completion, it’s a paradigm of the troubled contemporary history of Serbia. Communists have razed it and Nazis have parked their trucks and tanks in it.

It is unashamedly modern, though it honours ancient Byzantine mural and fresco methodologies. Its biblical stories in gold leaf use the traditional crafts, linking Belgrade to its ancient past, whatever despots may have done to interrupt its devotional history. We’re linked to the palace we’ve just left by enormous doors, inscribed with multi-lingual prayers of welcome, donated by the royal family.

Perhaps the allegory it offers is best illustrated by the image of Christ – no bullet hole now – in the dome, which was built and raised, centimetre by centimetre, from the ground. All 4,000 tonnes of it. The metaphor of rising from the ashes of war writes itself.

And that’s the takeaway from Belgrade. Serbia – and the wider Balkans – suffered a 20th-century of unfathomable bleakness. Its people have endured and their spirit isn’t broken, a moral exemplar for western Europe. Belgrade resonates to its folk music and young laughter over broken bread and wine outpoured (gosh, do they eat and drink – for who knows what tomorrow holds?).

The phoenix, which naturally shares Greek roots with Serbian royalty, would be the go-to cliché for the cyclical regeneration of Belgrade. But as this city approaches Easter, there is of course something else more fundamental going on.

Belgrade has faith in itself, as well as the God who has delivered it. It’s a resurrection story really.