N. Kósa Judit - Szablyár Péter: Underground Buda - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)
The Remete Ravine
50 metres from the foot of the hill, which has to be reached by "climbing" up a path trodden into the rolling hillside. The duct behind the 12-metre high entrance narrows drastically after the first few metres and is thus a bit of a disappointment, but then a beautiful panorama opens up of a sudden. The filling of the stone niche of Remete Hill was completely removed by the archaeological excavation carried out by Kálmán Lambrecht and Tivadar Kormos in 1914. The find was strikingly rich in bird bone remains from the upper Pleistocene era. During the classification of the find, the palaeogeo- graphical map of the cave was determined, which shows a soggy wasteland, which later dried up. Walking back into the ravine and then following the thin trickle of the rivulet we find the Lower Cave of Remete Hill, a cavity under special protection opening 10 metres above the base of the gorge. Behind the imposing entrance is a 25 metre long, 6-7 metre high chamber with a gradually elevating floor whose major gorge approaches the surface. Archaeologist László Vértes dug out the filling of the cave to a depth of 10.5 metres without reaching its natural rock base. Of the 13 layers uncovered, the first ten turned out to be of Holocene, while the tenth to the thirteenth of Postglacial and Pleistocene origin (i.e. less than 2.4 million years old). The oldest find is a microlith obsidian blade from the so-called Pilissszántó culture. The oldest finds in the upper nine levels are the remains of copper-age pottery. The bronze age, Celtic, Roman and medieval finds are proof that the cave was in continuous use. In layers five to nine there were bone remains (awls, arrow heads, antler-hoes and a necklace made of a boar’s tusk) as well as flint-flake objects (a stone axe, grinding stones) found in large numbers. Regrettably, the caves of the valley are once again occupied in the 21st century as the homeless of Budapest weather out the winter here. The other highly protected cave of the valley is the Remete Gorge Upper Cave, which was explored in 1969. Unknown before, the cave, whose entrance opens 320 metres above sea level, consists of a single, 29-metre long corridor, which is divided into an outer and an inner chamber. Led by Veronika Csánk, archaeologists of the Hungarian National Museum removed the entire filling of the cave. The archaeological exploration of the cave generated much excitement. While nothing of interest had been discovered in the Lower Cave at the bottom of the gorge, here, 70 metres above, in the leaf-littered humus outside the almost completely stopped-up entrance, Ice Age layers were found already 6
