The water cistern, well and wooden water pipe of the cave cellar of the building at 21 Fortuna Street in Buda Castle

Abstract

In the cave cellar opening from the building at Fortuna Street 21 in Buda Castle, we noticed in 2019 that a wooden pipe leads from the water collector in the southwest corner of the cave to the northeast part of the cave under the floor. The wooden pipe leads to the site of a former well, which has since been rebuilt into a reinforced concrete emergency exit for a World War II shelter. The wooden pipe may have been placed in this very damp cave cellar to conduct water from the cistern to the former well. The wooden pipe is 6 meters long, has an outer diameter of 24 cm, and an inner diameter of 10 cm. We took a sample from it that same year, and based on the dendrochronological examination of András Grynaeus, it turned out that the larch log could have been cut down in 1693 in the upper reaches of the Danube. Similar wooden water pipes were often used in the Middle Ages in our country and in several other countries, some of which I will present in this study. The pipe was probably placed near this public well to quickly restore the water supply to the ruined Buda Castle, which had been taken back from the Turks and was to be rebuilt. There were still public wells with similar high water-supply capacity in a few places in the Castle, which I also tried to present.