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 18

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