Morskie Oko
Interesting facts
- In 2014 The Wall Street Journal ranked Morskie Oko among the five most beautiful lakes in the world, alongside Lake Powell, Nakuru, Saimaa and Lake Lucerne.
- The lake holds roughly ten million cubic metres of water, and its green colour sits at level IV on the Forel-Ule water colour scale.
- In the 1970s the lake stayed frozen for about 171 days a year; by the 2000s the ice season had shrunk to around 157 days.
- Winter ice on the lake once reached an average maximum thickness of about 72 centimetres, falling to roughly 56 centimetres in later decades.
- Before the name Morskie Oko took hold, a 1650 source called it Biały Staw, the White Lake, and Austrian maps of 1880 still labelled it Fish Lake.
- Morskie Oko appeared on the Polish 20-złoty banknote of 1928.
- In 1860 the poet Deotyma crossed the lake on a raft to the music of highland bagpipes.
- Painters such as Leon Wyczółkowski and Walery Eljasz-Radzikowski and poets including Adam Asnyk and Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer took the lake as a subject.
- In 1637 King Władysław IV granted grazing rights around the lake; it passed into private hands in 1824 and became Polish state property in 1933.
- Beavers were first recorded at the lake in September 2021, an unusual sighting at almost 1,400 metres in the high Tatras.
Why it is worth it
Morskie Oko is the largest lake in the Tatras and probably the most famous view in Poland: a sheet of clear green water at 1,395 metres, ringed by granite walls that rise about a kilometre above it. Behind the far shore stand Mięguszowiecki Szczyt and, higher up the valley, Rysy, at 2,499 metres the highest point of the country, while the rock tooth of Mnich rises to the west. The lake is dammed by a glacial moraine, covers about 35 hectares and reaches a depth of just over 50 metres.
The name means "Eye of the Sea". An old local tale held that the lake was joined to the sea by an underground passage; earlier it was simply called the Fish Lake for its trout, which are uncommon in Tatra waters. The first written mention dates from 1575. Above it, reached by a steep path from the shore, lies a second lake, Czarny Staw pod Rysami, whose water spills down into Morskie Oko.
On the moraine stands the Stanisław Staszic mountain hut, one of the oldest Tatra chalets, named after the scholar who explored the lake in 1805. The lake also has a place in legal history: at the end of the nineteenth century Galicia and Hungary disputed which side of the border it lay on, and an arbitration tribunal sitting in Graz decided in favour of the Galician, now Polish, claim in 1902. The road that leads up the valley is named after Oswald Balzer, the Lwów professor who argued that case.
Morskie Oko is part of Tatra National Park and is extremely popular in summer; swimming and feeding the fish are forbidden. Early morning, when the walls catch the first light and the water is still, shows it at its best.
Getting there
Zakopane is about 14 km away. The nearest airport is Poprad-Tatry (TAT) in Slovakia, about 19 km in a straight line; on the Polish side, Kraków John Paul II International Airport (KRK) is about 100 km away. Private cars and buses stop at the Palenica Białczańska car park, from where a paved road climbs about 9 km to the lake — roughly two to two and a half hours on foot. Horse-drawn wagons driven by local highlanders cover most of the way.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Morskie Oko, or Eye of the Sea in English, is the largest and fourth-deepest lake in the Tatra Mountains, in southern Poland. It is located deep within the Tatra National Park in the Rybi Potok Valley, of the High Tatras mountain range at the base of the Mięguszowiecki Summits, in Lesser Poland Voivodeship. In 2014, The Wall Street Journal recognized the lake as one of the five most beautiful lakes in the world.
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