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

A city of vineyards and wine - from Budafok to Nagytétény

■ Street view in Budafok

30-40 metre thick, limestone rock capable of soaking up large quantities of water.

By the 20th century the ever increasing area of the Budafok—Tétény district had come to resemble a giant piece of Swiss cheese, whose holes were large caves used as storage and fermentation spaces by spirit, wine and champagne makers.

The vicinity of the capital and the presence of thriving local industries (a beer brewery, a match factory, an enamelling plant, a pig farm, etc.) attracted the poor of the land in ever growing numbers - homeless people who found cheap dwellings in the unhealthy subterranean holes. Consumption and rickets were endemic among the occupants of the humid, mouldy "apartments’’.

Although there was widespread agreement on the need to clear away these subhuman shelters, in 1947 there were still as many as a thousand occupants crowded into three hundred cave dwellings. After the last family moved out in 1966, the majority of the depressed courtyards were filled up, which rendered such dwellings uninhabitable.

One cave dwelling was spared as a memento to posterity - the flat at No. 4 Veréb utca, which once belonged to the widow Mrs. Győző Tóth, and where an exhibition was installed by the Budapest History Museum. Carved into

52