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

Turkish cellars, wells and caverns - the Castle Caves of Buda

■ A section converted into an air-raid shelter beneath Országhoz utca

cellar underneath. The population took refuge from the artillery fire during the siege underground." In the Castle "there are 75 public and 40 private wells and a further 17 basement cisterns.”

According to a kaddish bewailing the losses of the 1684—86 siege, one of the tunnels at what is today's Táncsics Mihály utca had been used as a storeroom by its Jewish owners. In his 1686 work assessing the Turkish buildings of Buda, Marsigli makes repeated mention of the fact that some of the cavities had been used as ice pits.

By the 18th—19th centuries the cavities riddling Castle Hill had lost their significance with the destruction of the vineyards of Buda. Supporting walls and buttresses built in the Baroque period testify that some of the cellars were still in use for a while longer, but most of them were simply filled with construction rubble and domestic rubbish. Although their wells were used, the rock, or Turkish, cellars were gradually forgotten.

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