Buza Péter: Bridges of the Danube - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1999)
The stories of gusts of wind extinguishing the light, the perils of lonely souls wandering in the pitch- darkness, passengers traversing the river and perishing after losing their way among the ice-drifts were all familiar tales told in old Pest-Buda. It was on piers built from these tales that a permanent bridge was slowly taking shape in the imagination of the people. The time would come for this dream- bridge to solidify into reality. The romans and perhaps King Sigismund too... The story of the permanent bridges of Pest-Buda first began in classical antiquity but had no continuation for centuries to come. Our ancestors were not even aware of the fact that the long-vanished people of the Roman Empire had already attempted to conquer the Danube. It was only in the 1860s, when the riverbed was being dredged above Margaret Island north of where Árpád Bridge stands now, that workers unearthed the foundations of some wooden piles. These had once supported a permanent Roman bridge connecting the camp of Aquincum with its counter-fort at the mouth of the Rákos Creek and with roads leading to the Great Plain inhabited by Barbarians. The bridge rested on a small island once lying near the northern tip of Margaret Island. This famous islet was called Bath Island. Indeed there were a bath and a pleasure-house on it during the golden age of Aquincum. Bath Island itself, in fact a squat sandbank, disappeared after the regulation of riverways in the last third of the 19th century. Dredgeboats demolished and swallowed it without leaving a trace. The carved Roman stones as well as the foundation of the wooden piles discovered at that time were destroyed by the necessary intervention of engineers. Presumably it was an upper deck bridge, if indeed this modern term can be applied to such an ancient construction. The design was quite similar to that 6
