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

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

■ Mediaeval ókulli in the óection open to the public

The first published map of the cave cellars in Castle Hill are also likely to have been based on Schubert's work. Issued in 1908 as an appendix to a report compiled by a committee headed by Tamás Szontágh, the i:2ooo-scale map gives the location of some sixty self-contained rock cellars in the area between Szent György tér and Szentháromság tér. The majority of these had been filled up by the time.

In the first decades of the 20th century, the holes were still regarded as no more than sources of potential danger. It is a documented fact that days before the coronation of Charles VI the police occupied the "network of caves beneath Szentháromság tér together with all the points of access to it”.

Although the geological curiosities of the rock cellars in Castle Hill - mainly the pisolite configuration (multitudes of globular limestone formations) beneath Dísz tér — attracted the attention of scientists in the last century already, its speleological importance was not been recognised until the director of the Military Museum Ottokár Kadic, also the chair of the Hungarian Association for Cave Research, called attention to it in 1931. In the wake of preliminary surveys, Kadié, assisted by speleologists Lajos Barbie and Miklós Kiss, started the "geological and speleological exploration" of the rock caves in the spring

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