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

The underground river of Pest - the mains trunk sewer underneath the Great Boulevard

■ The permanent exhibition hall will be lit via a huge glctóó pyramid

The underground river of Pest — the mains trunk sewer underneath the Great Boulevard

One axis of the municipal development of Pest, which had gathered momentum after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, was the Great Boulevard, a major thoroughfare whose construction was decreed in Act XLI1 of 1871 by the Municipality. With its more than four-kilometre length and the 253 new buildings raised on its sides in thirty years, the boulevard became one of the major achievements of urban development in Hungary at the turn of the century.

In its line of development the boulevard followed the bed of a branch of the Danube. Called "Fossatum Magnum’’, or the Great Ditch, in the Middle Ages, this branch had all but disappeared by the 19th century, but it was from here that Ferenc Reitter, the first chief engineer of the Budapest Board of Public Works, took the idea of building a navigable canal flanked by trees in its place. In the event, this ambitious idea was rejected.

The urgent instalment of a sewer system was called for by the drastic decline

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