Normafa Park

This guide to Normafa Park in Budapest opens in 1840, when the soprano Rozalia Schodel, out on a day off with her theatre troupe, climbed beneath a lone beech tree that someone joked looked like an opera set and began singing an aria with no orchestra and no stage. It follows the tree's own reputation among locals, who called it the Storm Beech for surviving lightning strike after lightning strike over the centuries. Some said the tree had stood since the fifteenth century, back in the days of King Matthias.