Buza Péter: Bridges of the Danube - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1999)

An old photograph showing the first version of the Chain Bridge

episode in the Sina saga is that the Turkish administration cited the case of Sina when it refused to extradite Lajos Kossuth to the Austrian government. The Padishah replied that the Turkish government’s request for the extraction of Sina had not been complied with either.

György Sina Jr. signed a reasonable contract but took a disproportionately high risk with his direct involvement. He had a key role in the whole construction project.

On 28 July 1840 began the construction of the first cofferdam, an enclosure of pile-rows from which water was expelled, which made the laying of the pier-foundations possible. The second cofferdam was finished by Christmas 1841, with the third and the fourth completed by the summer of 1842. Three rows of close-packed piles made of Slavonian pine timber, each pile measuring 20 to 24 metres in length and 40 centimetres in diameter, and each topped with heavy wrought-iron shoes, were driven into the riverbed with a ram weighing more than 1.5 tons. Impermeable blue clay was filled into the gaps between the piles to expel the water from these spaces. Thousands of piles were

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