This is the sixth cache of the Palic Lake tour.
Despite popular belief, Lake Palić is not a remnant of the vast Pannonian Sea which covered this area and completely drained out some 600,000 years ago. It is estimated that both the Palić and Ludoš lakes originated in the early Holocene, around 10,000 years ago, when the last major changes in the surrounding terrain occurred. Prior to that, since the draining of the sea, the European climate was much colder, with the exchange of the cold and dry and the warm and wet periods. Alternatively being frozen and defrosted, the rocks crushed under the ice and crumbled into the dust, which formed sand and loess. The winds would then disperse the loess into the valleys of the Danube and Tisza rivers to the southeast. On the wet grounds, the loess became more compact, becoming thinner and claylike. The surrounding dried land became more and more elevated thus creating the depressions which began to collect water. The process was helped with the erosion which was caused by the water flowing into the depressions. Due to the unstable hydrological regime, the lake constantly disappeared and reappeared through history.
The idea that the lake was remnant of the sea was influenced by its geographical location (in the bed of the former sea) and the fact that the water in the lake was salty. It is more likely that both lakes and the nearby river of Körös-ér are remnants of the former rivers which spilled over the Pannonian basin. Surveys showed that the loess layers are younger than the alluvial ones, so the lakes can't be remains of the former Danube's flow as the wind would naturally cover them with sand and loess.
The popular local legend of the lake's origin, which also explains the name, says that the shepherd Paul (Pal in Hungarian, Pavle in Serbian) was pasturing his sheep in the area. He had a lamb with the golden fleece but the lamb disappeared one day and the inconsolable Paul cried so much that his tears flooded the pasture and created the salty lake. The lake was then named Paligo Palus in Latin, Palics in Hungarian or Pavlova bara in Serbian.
The lake was mentioned for the first time in June 1462 when Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus bestowed it to his mother, Queen Mother of Hungary, Erzsébet Szilágyi.
Data on the quality of the water originate from 1847 when the first chemical analysis was done. The lake became a spa and the water was used for the soda water production. From the late 19th and into the most of the 20th century, the cyclic development of the overgrowth followed by the fish kill were common. In 1970 the eutrophication reached its peak and almost all the wildlife in the lake died. In 1971 the lake was dried, the sludge was dredged and removed, the filters were placed and the lake was refilled in 1976, but in the next decades, the lake got polluted again.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Pali%C4%87