Labyrinths of Buda Castle and Europe's second oldest Subway

Preshitoric Bison Drawing


Underneath the Buda castle compounds lies an amazing complex of underground tunnels called labyrinths. According to the brochures, the labyrinths of Buda castle stretch for up to 200 km and some sections are still yet to be discovered.dating back to prehistoric times, there were actually prehistoric drawings of bisons and people hunting for food. We initially took all of this information in like primary school children learning to read and write.


Stairway to What ?

Tibor has his doubts about the age of the labyrinths and guesses that they are at most 300 years old. During our walk into the labyrinth, there was this musty smell of dampness and there was this eerie piped in music of tribal drums which leant an air of mystery and fear.I was quite startled to find that around several pitch black corners were some steps leading to some kind of pagan structure. See picture above.


Half statue (of Saint Istvan) in the Labyrinth !

There was an young American tourist group behind us and they too were scared out of their wits, not knowing what kind of beings or structures lay beneath the Buda castle. Again, Tibor put the whole thing into perspective,stating that Hungarian history had no mention of labyrinths although I would think that they would form an effective form of escape if there was an uprising by the general population !

Midway through our walk, we came across what seemed to be a statue whose head was half submerged into the ground. It was in a sealed off section and one could not help thinking at perhaps there was something sinister about the labyrinths.It came to a head, (pun intended) when we all arrived at underground fountain spouting of all things, spoilt wine from a gargoyle's head.



Stone Sentry Guarding part of the Labyrinth

We finally realised that the marketing department of this attraction had put in all of these statues and creatures to spice up what would have otherwise been a boring walk in damp underground tunnels. The joke dawned upon us when the display plate on an underground feature stated that they had found what appeared to be a footprint, obeviously of a Nike Air Max and the statement had stated affirmatively that "this footprint was obviously not from a human being" !! All of the statues were actually fakes !


Underground Station in Budapest

The underground subway at Budapest was real enough though. It was the second oldest in Europe to be built after Moscow's Subway and is still in use, although tourists who don't understand Hungarian would be lost as all the signs are in Hungarian. Very fast an efficient, it was built during the Soviet occupation of Hungary during the 70s.