N. Kósa Judit - Szablyár Péter: Underground Pest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)
"To save and protect" - the air-raid shelters of the Budapest underground railway
The system of spaces beneath the Parliament building is in fact two-tiered. The courtyards themselves are on a level lower than Kossuth tér, and the windows of the basement peer out onto the surface here and there. Storage rooms and workshops are located here, but it is also on this level that the staff and MPs’ canteens are also located. The cellars beneath the basement do not occupy the full floor space of the building; it is here, for example, that the carpenters' storeroom can be found between the heating chambers. Walking underground beneath the Parliament building it is still the corridors and chambers of the ventilation system that the visitor most immediately notices. The brick-walled tunnels wind mysteriously underground with the fan of a ventilator here and the door of a heating chamber there meeting the eye. Inscriptions now inform the visitor of the capacity of a former air-raid shelter, now of the location of the nearest first-aid station or lavatory, and then of the closest unit where clothing contaminated by poison gas can be disposed of. What remains are only the signs, but the original doors are still clearly stencilled with warnings such as "Keep locked during a raid". During World War 11, an emergency hospital functioned in the basement of the Parliament building. The underground passages were converted into airraid shelters in the 1950s, when the corridors were walled off. The reinforcement of the ceilings and the partitioning of the corridors severely reduced the efficiency of the ventilation system. Although it was in recent years that the architectural department of the Parliament building was able to commence restoration of the tunnels to their original condition, the ventilation of the main stairway is already fully operational again. "To save and protect" — the air-raid shelters of the Budapest underground railway The underground railways of Budapest are used by more than a million people a day. The fist underground railway to be launched on the European continent, the "small underground” as it is called by local residents, is the lowest-capacity line with its 4.5 km line dotted with frequent stations and with its relatively smaller carriages. In an underpass at Deák tér there is a short, out-of-service tunnel housing the Underground Museum, the only one of its kind in the world. Metro line M2 took the longest time in the world to be built. Construction started in 1950, but was suspended in 1954 and was not resumed until 1963. It 12
