Buza Péter: Spring and Fountains - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)
be calculated from the size of the apertures, used to control the water level, in the uppermost well cylinder carved out of stone. Kálmán Tóth, the sculptor who made the reliefs for the broad-stone well-house, also the overseer of the reconstruction works carried out by the KÖR-team, found, cut into the uppermost cylinder, the name of Franz Töschler bricklayer, together with the date 1799. This date is likely to signify the time, give or take a year, when the well-house itself was completed. The structure is sure to have already existed in 1798 but probably not yet in 1795, and therefore we can assume that this protective building is not identical to the one erected at the time of Joseph II’s visit here. The well-house was originally built with a fluted base which base was renovated in the late 1820s when missing bits were replaced with bricks. In the framework of the construction of the Ludovika Academy, after 1836, but before 1848, the structure was reconstructed for the first time-with very little alteration. The building was pulled down as far as the mantle of the well tapping on the side facing the nearest publicly owned stretch of land. A stone wall was erected here with a curbed cast-iron tap casing in it. (The latter is now the casing of a drinking fountain in a buttress by Mátyás Church in Buda.) This was where the public could help themselves to water, while the pool-shaped section of the well-house, which remained after the demolition inside the wall, was used by the Ludovika Academy. A drainage pipe conducted any surplus water to the stable in the basement of the military school’s multi-storey manege. We have uncovered the remains of this drainage pipe. We do not exactly know when, but we can safely say that it must have been around the turn of the century that a protective vaulting was erected above the truncated building. The structure continued to be used for a while, which is indicated by the fact that a service access was opened through the covering, but in the years after the First World War the building was completely forgotten. The yard was given another, cinder, layer of covering, and the water of the well was no longer needed, which is understandable in light of the fact that by then it had virtually dried up “thanks to” the brewery. The reconstruction, by the Ludovika tér boundary of Orczy gardens, presents in its original splendour the well-house, which is likely to have been the largest and most beautiful in historical Hungary. But this reconstruction has remained incomplete ; no-one can today quench their thirst with the once fine tasting water of the Illés Fountain. 25
