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

the fault line presumably still richer in water than average, there are two huge, more than a hundred and fifty year old plane trees to remind us of the garden around the former Rumbach Bath, and they will continue to do so until the spirit of mercantilism sets its eye on the property. Unless a responsible authority protects the trees, the new owner can hardly be expected to do anything so that this beautiful history can continue.

Now we have reached the end of this review of the bases. Here we cannot address the topic of medicinal springs and thermal waters or their cultural history. As for public and ornamental springs, we are going to take up the story where we left it-one thousand years after the time when the Roman Empire had to withdraw from this faraway province, where it had made itself so nice and comfortable.

The story begins in Buda

Buda becomes a royal seat under King Zsigmond [Sigismund] and King Mátyás [Matthias]. It is the 14th and, even to a greater extent, the 15th centuries that see, for the first time, the royal court and the public places around it being furnished with the comfortable or just beautiful facilities now being reviewed.

Water supplies had two sources in the Middle Ages. One was the Danube, from which a special mechanism, built into the cortina, a system of walls running down to the bank, elevated the water to the Castle and the surrounding residential area. (This water conveyance system functioned in Turkish times, too, and was reconstructed, for the last time, by Farkas Kempelen, a universally talented handyman of the Baroque era.) The other sources of water supplies were the springs on the side of Sváb Hill, which were connected to the Castle by another often reconstructed pipeline system.

On the Pest side, there was no mains water before the establishment in the 19th century of the city’s water works. However, many previous attempts had been made. Each of these plans would have based the system on the Illés Fountain, sometimes taking the spring in Magistrate Mosel’s garden into consideration as a supplementary source, and in one late 17th century municipal document there is a reference made to “Illyna Voda” by an official who finds it important to mention that the water of this spring “used to be” taken to Pest, all the way to today’s Kálvin tér. We shall return to this reference, and to the history of the well itself.

Tradition connects the King Béla Well in Béla király út on Sváb Hill to the person of Béla IV. That tradition, however, is not likely to be very well-founded, even though the spring may well have been known at the time of the ruler who directed the

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