The White Elephant, a once famous Polish observatory in the Carpathians, is as close to the stars as it only could be. Just look at the ruins and try to imagine that the complex erected on top of the Chornohora, or the Mount Black, is located more than two kilometres above the sea level! The initial construction, the Marshal Jozef Pilsudski Astronomical and Meteorological Observatory, was established back in 1938, when Western Ukraine was still a part of Poland. No one really knows why it was baptized as the “White Elephant” – could it be due to its unusual L-shape, or because of the grand amount of time, effort, and money its design and construction consumed?
