Buza Péter: Spring and Fountains - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)

The surviving protective building of the Városkút [Town Well], the

ONCE FAMOUS SPRING NO LONGER PRESENTS ANYBODY WITH ITS TREASURE

water mains of medieval Buda. Its water spouts, to this day, from a Gothic well-house. The length of the pipeline to the well by the street below is 350 metres, and from there to the one-time outflow it is 300 metres. Above the spring there was an old well-house, which was demolished after World War II.

The master builder in charge of reconstruction after the Turkish occupation was a Jesuit friar, Konrad Kerschen- steiner, whose efforts had borne fruit by 1716. According to contemporary documents, the first stretch of the mains was a twenty “öl” (37 metre) long, covered vaulted channel, and continued first in a 688 öl (1260 metre) long wooden line and then in a 2600 öl (2600 metre) long lead pipeline, which ran all the way to an ornamental cistern in Szentháromság [Holy Trinity] tér in the Castle district. The line was lengthened in the late 18th century when a still existing little spring house was built. In a wall of this small house were built some Romanesque stone carvings, which had perhaps come from the Pauline cloister of Budaszentlörinc.

A third source supplying water through pipelines to the public places of Buda was another edge water spring, the so-called Sváb-kút [Swab Well]. In its original state it spouted water, which ran down the south-south-eastern slopes of Sváb

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