N. Kósa Judit - Szablyár Péter: Underground Buda - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)

Turkish cellars, wells and caverns - the Castle Caves of Buda

■ A mediaeval well

basements built below the houses. Almost every building had its own dear- water well. The three hundred or so houses in medieval Buda had almost as many (285) wells fed by "cave waters”. Certain reinforcements are likely to have been made as early as the Middle Ages when rocks deemed dangerous were propped up with pillars or vaults here and there.

The first extant written records relating to the underground world of Castle Hill date to the 16th century. Miklós Oláh, the former archbishop of Esztergom and secretary to the dowager of Louis II, wrote this in 1536: "The inside of Castle Hill is virtually empty because of the innumerable wine cellars in it...”

Legends of secret tunnels and military manoeuvres connected to them were in circulation about the holes. According to the best-known of these, the tunnels had reached as far as Margaret Island, Tétény (ten kilometres from here) and even Visegrád (a town forty kilometres from Buda). Around 1660, the Turkish traveller Evliya Cheleby noted the following: "Every palace has a

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