A 19th-century viewing tower, from which the name comes

The Kikut Lighthouse stands on Wolin Island, in Wolin National Park, not far from the holiday village of Wisełka. Before it was a lighthouse, a viewing tower from the 19th century stood on this spot. According to Wikipedia, the name Kikut comes precisely from its German name Kiekturm. The root kiek, in old spelling kyk, derives from a word meaning to look, and the source of this etymology is Marian Czerner's 1971 book on the lighthouses of the Polish coast.

Wikipedia notes, however, that the explanation is not the only one and that the matter is confused. In a separate entry on the Kikut hill we read that the name was officially introduced in 1949, replacing the German name Kiesberg or Kiekut, and that Kiekturm was supposed to be the German name of the neighbouring hill Strażnica. These entries cannot therefore be fully reconciled: one speaks of a tower on Kikut, the other attributes the name Kiekturm to Strażnica. Who built the 19th-century viewing tower is not stated in these sources.

Why ships needed a new lighthouse

The reason for building the lighthouse was practical. In the 1960s the development of the Szczecin-Świnoujście port complex meant that ever larger ships entering Świnoujście needed more precise determination of their position on the approach channel. It was therefore proposed to convert the viewing tower on the hill into a lighthouse. The conversion design was prepared by the Maritime Construction Design Office in Gdańsk.

The conversion was simple. The round tower of fieldstone, 10.2 m high, was raised with bricks by 2.6 m. On it a lantern painted white was placed. The light was first lit on 10 February 1962, and the optical equipment was brought from Sweden. According to Wikipedia, an electric-gas lamp with a 1000 W bulb originally operated there, with four acetylene cylinders on the ground floor as a reserve, connected to the lamp by pipes.

A lighthouse without a crew

After twenty years the gas installation was removed in favour of an electric one, with a changer holding two bulbs. Since 1994 the lantern has housed a cylindrical lens 500 mm in diameter with a six-position changer of halogen bulbs of 75 W each. When one burns out, the mechanism rotates and brings in the next. In the event of a power failure an automatically charged battery of accumulators operates.

Thanks to this the lighthouse requires no on-site staff. According to Wikipedia, which gives this after a study of Polish lighthouses and their connection with tourism, it is the only unmanned lighthouse in Poland, and in lists of navigation lights it appears as unattended. It is administered by the Maritime Office in Szczecin, and the interior cannot be entered, because the lighthouse is not open to visitors.

A low tower, a high light

According to Wikipedia the whole lighthouse is 18.2 m high (after the conversion the stone-and-brick shaft was 12.8 m, with the lantern on top), but the light lies at a height of 91.5 m above sea level and has a nominal range of 16 nautical miles, that is, about 29.6 km. The light lies so high thanks to the elevation: according to Wikipedia the Kikut hill is 73 m above sea level, and Strażnica 73.9 m. Wikipedia's entries differ on which of the two neighbouring hills, about 250 m apart, the lighthouse stands on, but the heights of the two differ by less than a metre.

Wikipedia gives the distances to neighbouring lighthouses: about 28 km to the west to the lighthouse in Świnoujście and about 30 km to the east to Niechorze. The light is isophase: five seconds on, five seconds off. On the tower there is also one of the eleven coastal stations of the AIS-PL system on the Polish coast, used for automatic monitoring of ship traffic.

How to see it from outside

A forest trail through Wolin National Park leads to the lighthouse. The forest lake Zatorek has an educational loop, a viewing tower and a trail to the Kikut lighthouse. Wolin National Park itself is a park with cliffs and viewpoints. The lighthouse discussed here is the Kikut Lighthouse.