N. Kósa Judit - Szablyár Péter: Underground Buda - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)

The Devil's Ditch: Buda's rapid brook imprisoned

transport was rendered useless; the water-drainage ditches were washed away fathoms-wide, bridges and walls were swept away, the roads were littered with boulders that could only be blasted away with gunpowder. Many a vineyard disappeared without a trace."

Calculations made in 1879 put the losses caused by the disaster at 3,113,024 forints 90 krajcár (nearly ten times the sum set aside for prevention in 1873). The disaster of the Devil's Ditch was the first major failure of the Board of Public Works. The explanation ran like this: "the ditch not being connected to the open canal in Vérmező, the alluvium swept down the hills and through the admitting port at St. John’s Bridge, together with the stone slabs ripped out of the Horváth tér section of the ditch, were thrown into the interior of the ditch. This would have been avoided, had the ditch already been connected to the open canal in Vérmező and the mud trap in between made.” The link, together with the trap, was made in June 1876, for the first anniversary of the disaster... The open ditch could now be filled all the way to St. John's Bridge. From that time on it was only the statue of St. John of Nepomuk, which was renovated by a Buda burger Ferenc Jámborffi in 1877, that suggested the former bed of the Devil's Ditch and the bridge across it named for the patron saint of those travelling by water. (A replica of the statue, which had been removed from here in 1950, has recently been set up near its original place.)

By May 1878 the section up to Városmajor had been covered. The 100-year- old public park (called Stadt-Mayerhof at the time) was prevented from fulfilling its function by the presence in its middle of the slow-flowing, stale ditch and the fun fair established at the beginning of the 19th century. The covering of Ördög-árok here had been completed by the late 1910s with the labour of Russian prisoners of war. Built in 1923, the smaller Városmajor Church was followed by a major church building and belfry raised in 1933—35 (to plans by Aladár and Bertalan Árkay). It was because of the covered ditch that the massive, reinforced-concrete belfry had to be raised away from the church to which it is connected by a pleasant row of arcades.

In January 1945, during the last, desperate stage of the siege of Budapest, the Devil's Ditch entered military history. In mid-January, in the final phase of the grim battle fought for possession of the Castle District, the Vannay Battalion approached a Soviet ammunition depot by way of the ditch.

The situation of the defenders having become untenable in the surrounded Castle by 11 February, the German and Hungarian command, together with a

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