Adamkó Péter - Dénes György - Leél-Őssy Szabolcs: The Caves of Buda - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1992)

Budapest is a city of caves, or what is more, a capital of caves. There is no other big city with a population of two millions underlain by numerous caves of several kilometers in length.

Even the name of Budapest refers to a cave. The conspicuous, cliffy hill towering above the west bank of the Danube, today known as Gellért Hill, boasts a dark, spacious hollow in its southeastern wall facing the river. From the opposite bank it is readily seen even from a great distance. 1100 years ago the Hungarian tribes migrated from the East European plains to the banks of the Danube and settled here. Having no word for cave, they called the wide hollow in the hillside “pest”, borrowing the word from the Slavic tribes already living in the area. The hill itself became known as Pest Hill, that is, “hill of caves”. Later the river crossing at the foot of the hill was called Pest Ferry, and the adjacent settlements on the banks of the Danube were named Pest and Little Pest. The latter merged into Buda, a more recent settlement built on the plateau of Castle Hill after the Tartars’invasion. Thus the city of Pest means “city of caves”.

This name now seems to be a fulfilled prophecy. At that time, apart from some smaller caves, only that large, prominent cave on the hill facing the Danube was known. Among the five major caves discovered since then — altogether more than 24 km in length—not one had a natural entrance. Only the discoveries of the 20th century revealed the spectacular, many kilometer long caves rich in hydrothermal mineral formations beneath the city.

Budapest’s cave systems are the ancient, now inactive vents of the hot springs which supply the thermal waters of today’s famous spas.

You need not be a scientist to notice that the caves of Budapest are quite different from the famous dripstone caves, e.g. the Baradla Cave near Aggtelek- Jósvafő or the Postojna Cave in Yugoslavia. Here there are no gigantic dripstone columns and monumental cave chambers. None of the caves of Budapest is a real dripstone cave, their modest dripstone formations are not considered among the main treasures. They belong to a much rarer type of cave and are quite interesting from a scientific point of view.

5