---
title: Waq-Waq tree
type: Legend
description: The legendary tree of Arabic and Indo-Persian lore whose fruit grew as human heads or women and cried out "waq waq".
resource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wak-Wak
tags: [waqwaq, tree, marvels, persian]
timestamp: 2026-06-01T00:00:00Z
---

# Waq-Waq tree

The Waq-Waq tree is a legendary tree of Arabic and Indo-Persian lore whose branches or fruit took the form of human heads, whole women, or animals, each crying the word *waq waq*. In the common account the fruit ripened like ordinary produce until, on falling from the branch, it gave out its cry. Some versions add that the fruit bore a human face, that a voice issued from it when the wind moved through the leaves, and that once picked the figure lost its breath and went flat like a piece of empty skin.

Descriptions vary in detail. One tradition decorates the tree symmetrically with the heads of women, birds, horses, ducks, monkeys, hares, foxes, cocks, and rams. In the tales tied to the [[islands-of-waqwaq|land of Waq-Waq]] and in the Thousand and One Nights, the fruit are beautiful women who hang from the branches by their hair and die when they are cut down.

The tree belongs to the medieval [[ajaib-al-makhluqat|literature of marvels]], and its fullest early descriptions appear in the cosmography of Zakariya al-Qazwini (1203-1283), who placed it among the wonders of the eastern seas. In Persian retelling and painting it was often identified with the oracular [[speaking-tree|tree that prophesied the death of Alexander]], so that the talking fruit of the marvels-literature and the speaking tree of the Alexander legend came to share a single image.

The same idea of fruit shaped like human faces reappears far to the east in Japan, where Edo-period encyclopedias and yōkai catalogues describe the [[jinmenju|jinmenju]], a tree whose fruit are faces that laugh rather than cry.

See also [[etymology|the name Waq-Waq]] and [[in-art|the tree in art]].
