Szablyár Péter: Step by step - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)
Vertical immobility - the maid's backstairs
limestone cap protecting the hill, and in the deposits accumulated in the tide lands of the former Devils Ditch. In the wake of human activity, these caves were enlarged and interconnected, which is how the system of passages known today has emerged. The residential buildings of the civic town had their own cellars, and most of them could rely on their own wells, too. The cavities discovered when wells were bored in the cellars were connected to the cellar levels by stairs. Later the cavities themselves were linked to one another, which is how a veritable labyrinth came into being. The last major reconstructions here were undertaken in preparations for World War 11 broke out, and then in the hysterical atmosphere of the Cold War period. The maintenance, preservation and the structural deterioration of these mostly unused caves has become a major problem these days. That most of the stairs leading up to the houses have been walled in as a burglary-prevention measure has disturbed the ventilation of the system, which will speed up the decay. Vertical immobility — the maids’ backstairs Apartment buildings erected in Budapest in the period between the Austro Hungarian Compromise of 1867 and the outbreak of World War II had an indispensable element: the "cselédlépcső’’, or the maids' backstairs, the twin-sister of the service entrance. in his novel Egy polgár vallomáiai (Confessions of a Bourgeois) novelist Sándor Márai writes this of Budapest’s maids: "The maid was always made subservient to the family, but her familial subservience was of a relative sort: she was treated as a kind of member of the family... But in the bourgeois family, she was no longer a relative of any sort. The rough treatment accorded to her was duly taken over from patriarchal times, but the sense of community, of social responsibility, had disappeared from the master-servant relationship." And this is how he remembers elsewhere: "As a schoolboy I boasted of our servants using a separate toilet. In reality maids never used the lavatories set aside for them; some strange modesty or timidity must have prevented them from doing so. One really had no idea where they went to relieve themselves. Perhaps they went to where they always had gone, from the beginning of time." The maid’s legal standing was codified in Article XIII of the 1876 Law, which was necessitated by the growing number of domestic employees. There were 28,986 maids working in the private households of Budapest in 1880, as many as 67,922 in 1910, and no fewer than 58,853 in the year 1941, "carrying out, on a permanent basis, certain domestic duties, continuously employed in certain periods of the day without precisely stipulated temporal constraints.” 85
