N. Kósa Judit - Szablyár Péter: Underground Buda - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)
Mine into monastery - the Bátori Cave
had the cave cleaned, closed the entrance with an ornamental iron grill and had a flight of stairs built down to the entrance chamber. Bátori's work was commemorated with a memorial plaque and a copy of a painting that represented Bátori, the Bible copier. In 1917—19, the cave was traversed and mapped by the prominent cave explorer Ottokár Kadid. A far longer stretch was known at the time than after World War II. For the purposes of tourism, the cave was built out for a second time to plans by Imre Havran in 1931. In 1935, a marble altar was installed in the entrance chamber to emphasise, in the spirit of the times, the cultic functions of the cave. More recent explorations were initiated by Ferenc Szitár and György Vajna in 1961. Members of the BSE Cave Explorers' Group researched the history of the cave as well as exhuming stoked-up sections and opening up previously undiscovered shafts. Their findings were published by György Vajna in a monograph entitled A rejtélyei Bátori-barlang (The Mysterious Bátori Cave) in 1973. With the permission of the Duna-lpoly National Park, you can enter the cave by way of an iron gate to descend on a vertical ladder to the largest entrance chamber of the cave measuring 3-6 metres across and 6-10 metres lengthwise, with its ceiling 8 metres above the base at its highest point. An artificial entrance opened by explosion at bottom level in 1966 is now sealed by large quantities of rubble and locked by an iron gate. The Pyramid Branch — the section leading to the deepest point of the cave - is the richest part of the entire system in rock formations. Besides groups of pisolite and cauliflower-shaped groups there are clusters of snow-white rock gypsum and stalactites. The shaft consists of two series of spherical cells connected by a narrow, stoked-up duct. The most beautiful part of this section is the Lake Hall or Watering Hole, with walls covered by a glinting coat of calcite-aragonite and a small, hardly half-square-metre pond at its bottom with varying water levels in it. The walls of the Chamber of Faith also feature pisolite of varying shape and, in places, milk-white stalactites. The walls are covered with limestone in places webbed with veins of ore. Leading to the chamber named László Szabó after a prominent member of a group of explorers and lying 15 metres below the surface there is a series of spherical cells. The sight of the reddish-brown pisolite formations here is accentuated by the snow-white rock-milk next to it. The sections called Small and Large Steps are artificially broadened-out ducts. Besides the steps carved into stone, the ancient marks once left by miners’ tools in the walls are pre24
