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

featured such an ornamental fountain. There is evidence to prove that a similar instalment decorated the local youth association’s viridarium (a flower garden with ornamental columns), one of the public buildings in Aquincum. Archaeologists have managed to reconstruct, from its fragments, the pride of the formal garden of the ‘collegium iuventutis’. We have no reason to doubt that there were more ornamental fountains like these, which embellished the capital of this distant province of the Roman Empire. However, the greater part of this rich heritage has been destroyed with no trace left.

With that we have to skip at least a thousand years and resume our historical narrative in the Middle Ages. It is in this period that, first in the royal court and later in the public spaces of Buda, water usage facilities, varying in their degree of luxury, begin to appear and decorate the city once again. However, before we actually return to our story, we shall have to make a detour in order to examine two questions in broad outline. One concerns the problem of genesis, the other the hydro-geological features which characterize and determine the accessibility of water in the region of Budapest; in other words what the given conditions are like. It is beyond dispute that the style of water utilization was determined, especially in the periods preceding the 19th century, by the city’s natural environment.

Types of water

Springs and water have always played an important part in the history of settlements. Their discoverers and users have tried, since the earliest times, to protect them from any natural or other, external, threat and to artificially sustain, or even increase, their output. The earliest instances of spring tapping only involved maintenance and the installation of a somewhat firmer covering than nature itself could provide. Later, however, permanent buildings were erected above the well-heads, which practice brought with it the appearance of decorative motifs. Some of the water-supplying facilities built in the Middle Ages were already genuine ornamental wells. Although this decorative function has never been clearly separated from the primary role of spring tapping, the first signs of the deliberate use of wells for aesthetic purposes in order to improve the mediaeval cityscape were already present. In Budapest, the first fountains with the sole function of decorating the city’s parks and squares were not to appear before the last third of the 19th century.

Let us now examine what the geological bases of water supply are in and around Budapest. We will not now discuss surface waters, even though before we turned them into liquid

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