Who Will Save the “White Elephant”?

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?

Unfortunately, enormous resources invested in the designing and building of the complex went down the sink when the observatory was ceased by the Soviets during the Second World War. Once a thriving scientific facility with autonomic heating, water supply and electric systems, advanced telescopes, meteorological instruments, and electrically-operating machines of all kinds, it is now a sad reminder of the fact that neglect and vandalism can cause more damage that war, weather, and time combined. Reconstructed and turned by the Soviets into a meteorological station in 1939, the observatory got completely abandoned after 1945. Local people still believe that during the war it served as a Soviet military base equipped with the most modern secret weapons of mass extinction! Now turned into what looks like ancient ruins, the unprotected construction attracts occasional tourists and, unfortunately, many more vandals.

Several theoretical attempts have been made to save the observatory. During one of them, implemented in the mid-1990s by the Ukraine’s National Academy of Science, a half-a-million dollar business project was drafted to renovate the building and make it functional again. Not such a large sum of money, especially if to take into consideration that, in many countries, it is a cost of a humble family house. However, when I visited the observatory earlier this year, the untouched ruins looked back at me again.

Will anybody save the White Elephant?