N. Kósa Judit - Szablyár Péter: Underground Buda - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)
The Devil's Ditch: Buda's rapid brook imprisoned
was called Tímár (Tanner) Brook, later Paul's Ditch, St. Paul’s Creek, St. Paul's Ditch (names indicating that its water sprang from the vicinity of the Buda- szentlőrinc monastery of the Pauline order). The name Ördög-árok, or Devil’s Ditch, derives from medieval times when legends often attached the name to mysterious brooks with an erratic flow. It is a curious coincidence that our Devil’s Ditch joined the Danube at the foot of what was then called Witches' Mount (today's Gellért Hill). The brooks and ditches of Budapest flowing into the Danube, a river which flows 2340 cubic metres per second through Hungary's capital, have a negligible water yield. The Devil’s Ditch, the middle one of five right-side streams (Dera Brook, Arany Hill Ditch, the Devil's Ditch, Hosszúrét Ditch, Benta Brook), is among the smallest with its 65 square kilometre catchment basin. Hiding as it is today, its "bed" is hard to identify, as its closed profile tunnel winds from the barracks on Hűvösvölgyi út underneath the monuments of Áron Gábor and Raoul Wallenberg following a track along Városmajor (the City Manor), Maros utca, Southern Station, Vérmező, Horváth Gardens, Árok utca and Döbrentei tér to flow into the river at the 1646.2 kilometre section of the Danube where the embankment rises above the ditch's vaulted cover. Although its mini-tributaries, the Zugliget Ditch, the Budenz Ditch, the Kapi utca Ditch and the Diós Ditch, are hardly noticeable in the densely built-over neighbourhood where they flow, these brooks actually channel off large quantities of rainwater. At the beginning of the 19th century the Devil's Ditch was in an ever narrower bed between walls in the spontaneously growing Rácváros, the neighbourhood within the Tabán quarter visited by a series of natural disasters (conflagrations, floods, a phylloxera epidemic). Coursing by the backyards of the town, the Devil’s Ditch was littered with domestic garbage and thus turned into a stinking canal. The first measure to be vetoed for environmental considerations was a plan, rejected by the municipality of Buda in 1861, to conduct the sewage of the military hospital, under construction at the time in Alkotás utca, into the Devil's Ditch. Controlling its flow (which basically meant the paving and covering of the bed) became urgent in this fastgrowing neighbourhood of Buda. The Board of Public Works, a body established in 1870, undertook the job and earmarked from the capital's budget the sum of 376,000 forints for the purpose in 1873. Entrepreneurs Bódog Buzzi and Napoleon Kéler started the work at St. John's Bridge by the south end of Horváth tér on 5 March 1873. In 1874, construction work was already in 10
