You would never guess when the last cave-dweller left his home in Budapest – photos

After watching the Lord of the Rings, many could think that living beneath the earth is romantic. But the caves of Budapest offered nothing else but death for their residents.

The first cliff dwellings were created during the Ottoman occupation of the Hungarian capital because they dug caves to store wine properly. Of course, the wine-dresser looking after the beverage also received a cave serving as a home for him and his family. Furthermore, the rising demand for good quality limestone also resulted in a lot of mines in the neighbourhood which were reshaped later as dwellings – szeretlekmagyarorszag.hu reported.

In the beginning, mostly miners and their families occupied these “flats”, but later these became part of the real estate market and mostly tenants lived in them. In the middle of the 19th century

a quarter of Budafok’s population, 3,000 people lived in cliff dwellings.

The high demand encouraged the adaptation of new techniques. Firstly, the builders dug a huge square-shaped hollow and created cliff dwellings in all directions from it. People liked cliff dwellings in those days because their walls were much more resistant than any buildings’. Moreover, they needed only minor modifications to become inhabitable.

There were doors in each dwelling, the walls were whitewashed, and in some cases, builders even created chimneys in the dwellings. They also put some simple furniture but did not modify the ceiling or the floor.

These dwellings were favoured because of their low price among the

poor inhabitants of Budapest.

For example, the rent of a cliff dwelling in Budafok was only 50-120 Hungarian korona for a year, but one could easily receive 40-60 korona in the Törley champagne factory per month. The rent was very inexpensive those days, and one could even buy a cliff dwelling for 2-3,000 korona, which was achievable in a 10 years’ interval for many people.