Białowieża — Belovezhskaya Pushcha on the Belarusian side — is a forest where about half of all the wood is dead, and that is exactly what makes it precious. Nothing is planted or tidied: oaks that have stood four to six centuries topple and are left to rot where they fall, feeding some 12,000 species, half of which depend on decaying wood. A managed forest holds roughly a tenth as much. This is the largest surviving piece of the primeval lowland forest that once covered the European Plain, and it lasted for a blunt reason — rulers wanted somewhere to hunt. Protected as a royal hunting reserve from 1541 to save its bison, it escaped the axe while the plain around it became farmland; Soviet leaders later kept a hunting lodge among the trees. UNESCO now guards 141,885 hectares of it, divided by the Belarus-Poland border.
The bison were shot out anyway. The last free-living animal here fell in 1919, and the species survived only in zoos: every European bison alive today, some 12,000 of them, descends from twelve of those captives. The Belarusian park now counts about 730, and Belarus holds nearly a quarter of the world's herd — bulls approaching 900 kilograms, the heaviest land animal in Europe. Walk the trails and you cross cathedral-quiet old growth and black-alder swamp glowing green with duckweed; the herds are easiest to find in winter, when the leaves are down and the hay racks draw them into the open. The forest is a hard border now, too: in 2022 Poland raised a steel fence 5.5 metres high and 186 kilometres long straight through it, and lynx and bison can no longer cross between the two halves.