Buza Péter: Spring and Fountains - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)

Workers building a sewage network found an abundant spring in Kútvölgyi út, above the former military cemetery. This one had a high salt content, and therefore the supervisor of the construction had it buried in case it endangered the pipes. The spring near Zalai út had a similar fate-it fell victim to construction works when the road was widened. On top of it all, the spot was designated as a rubble dump site.

There was a hot-water spring in the corner of a former ice rink, and the yard of a small house in Víziváros [Watertown] was made famous by the bitter water welling up in it. Authorities suspect, or rather suspected in the years discussed in the above cited publication, that there might also be a stopped spring beneath Krisztina tér.

Mária Spring in Óbuda is worth more detailed treatment. One day at the beginning of this century a local Óbuda resident called on Ede Reiner MD, an authority on medicinal baths and a member of the Budapest municipality. What Mr. Felber, the learned doctor’s visitor, brought with him was an expert analysis of the water welling forth in the courtyard of his own house. He communicated to Dr. Reiner that there was a strange-tasting spring in the cellar of his house at no. 56 ürömi utca, and that he had already begun to collect its water in a cistern, since he was convinced that it had a beneficial medicinal effect. Dr. Reiner was willing to arrange for the clinical tests of the substance. The water did in fact turn out to have a mild but reliable laxative effect, and could therefore be safely given to constipated children. Tests continued for years thereafter, and the house was sold in the meantime. Its new owner offered the property for sale to Dr. Reiner, the only person he assumed capable of managing the spring, which had by then been baptized Mária Spring. After some hesitation, the balneologist accepted the offer and bought the property. He then proceeded to have the house rebuilt and, most importantly, to have the spring properly tapped and the water channelled to a bottling plant installed in the yard. Reiner gave an account of all this in a paper he presented at a national conference on balneology in 1907. He also gave voice here to his hopes of turning his property into a commercial as well as a medical success. The printed text of his lecture is now the only available document proving the existence of these medicinal waters, for not even in ürömi utca is there any sign telling the tale of the once famous spring.

“There are no natural edge water springs on the Pest side,” asserts a comprehensive monograph on the natural geography of Budapest (Henrik Horusitzky, Budapest dunaparti részének talajvize és altalajának geológiai vázlata, Hidrológiai Közlöny, XV., 1935. [The Subsoil Waters of Budapest with a Geological Outline of the Region’s Substrata]). The

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