Buza Péter: Spring and Fountains - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)
Statement is precisely put as the author uses the present tense. That, however, does not mean that the current state of affairs was always the same. It was in Pest, a region indeed remarkably poor in springs, where Illyna Voda or Illés-vize [Elias’ Water], the capital’s most famous spring fountain, was once located, presumably together with a chain of subsoil waters along a fault line, which springs supplied baths with ferrous water. We shall later return to the former, the famous edge-water spring, while the latter, being of only marginal interest to our subject, cannot be given full treatment here. However, the geological curiosity behind the phenomenon, supplemented with the historical ramifications of the facts, deserves a few sentences. The first ferrous bath in Pest was built by Sebestyén Rum- bach, one-time municipal health officer, as early as 1806. He bought a very large plot near Városerdő [Town Forest] bounded by today’s Podmaniczky, Dózsa György, Lendvay and Bajza streets. It was his intention to start a vineyard here, but no sooner had the first sod been cut than it turned out that there was ferrous water hidden beneath the surface, and when a few more shovels of earth were lifted, it also became clear that it would be worth building a bath on the spot. Some time later another Feli-owned ferrous bath opened in the Remete [Hermit] House in Király utca. Its successor, the Körút Bath, was still in use before the war. Today its rooms, magnificent even in their present dilapidated condition, are beneath the Hotel Royal-perhaps hiding for shame. It was near here that Kernstock’s ferrous bath was in operation. Finally mention must be made of Municipal Magistrate Mosel’s garden which boasted a spring fountain. The centre of the garden after which Práter utca was named, was where Molnár Ferenc tér is located today. The beautiful ornamental garden survived, as the garden of the Seminary, into the 20th century, but then most of it was built on in 1916. The above-mentioned monograph by Henrik Horusitzky discussing the hydro-geology of Budapest features a map showing the location of subsoil water streamlets, and we also have a map with the fault line in the Pleistocene shore. If we connect the premises of the above-mentioned ferrous baths with each other and with the point at which the spring welled up in the Mosel garden, then we get a line which coincides, to the metre, with the direction of the significant subsoil water stream indicating the Pleistocene fault line. What all this means is that in a not insignificant period of its history the Pest side, which has admittedly been always poorer in springs than the Buda side, could and actually did make use of its geological resources, although these have since been lost. On the plot at no. 91 Szondy utca, a point on 11
