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

"Daddy how goes in…" - artificial caves in the Zoo

■ 3 March 1999: the óidé oj Greater Rock and the Lynxes' pen caved in

That was how the Greater Rock, a formation 35 metres high at its peak, came to resemble the corroded, grey limestone mass of the Karst Mountains, and the Smaller Rock, with its 22-metre high top, looks by the pond like a mountain made of rock that has issued from the depths of the earth (a granite and thick- bench gneiss).

When the rocks were completed, visitors were allowed to climb to the peaks which command an excellent view of the entire Zoo.

The outlines of these "hills" delineated by a reinforced concrete mantle and the structure itself represented the cutting edge of engineering technology at the time.

Construction work on the artificial rocks was started by the company of György Pohl in 1909. During the job, which took three years and the efforts of 150-220 workers (of whom fifty specialised on the louvres), eight thousand cubic metres of concrete was built into the structure. First the supporting

35