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

"To save and protect" - the air-raid shelters of the Budapest underground railway

■ Safety gateway in the metro

was completed in 1970, with the entire line running all the way to Fehér út being opened to traffic in 1972. The staggered opening of M3, a line partly running right under the surface; started in 1977 and was only fully finished in 1990.

Those using lines 1 and 2 have little idea that their regular journeys take them by the largest air-raid shelter of the Hungarian capital. World War II demonstrated that metropolitan cities well-equipped with air-raid shelters such as London sustained far lighter casualties than those without an appropriate protective system. That is why lines 2 and 3 were constructed in such a manner that the equipment of the metro could, with minor alterations, be turned to the purposes of a huge air-raid shelter in an emergency as well as normally functioning as a means of public transport. (It was especially with the construction of line M2 that this was a major consideration; those, after all, were the years of the Cold War.) Such auxiliary instalments were made as were necessary for the secure accommodation of 200-220,000 inhabitants of Budapest.

Most of the tunnels and stations lie at a depth of twenty to thirty metres, which is ideal from a defence point of view. The entrances and other points of communication with the surface are located in the busiest and most easily accessible junctions, equipped with escalators providing for easy movement.

A basic criterion of the tunnels functioning as air-raid shelters is that elec13