Palvolgyi Cave

This guide to Palvolgyi Cave opens in 1904, when a grazing sheep vanished through the floor of a stone quarry in the Buda Hills and the quarry owner's son, John Bagyura, climbed down after it with two companions. It follows how that fall led to the cave's slow opening to visitors by lamplight in 1919, and to a darker chapter during the Second World War, when Budapest families sheltered underground from the bombing above. Best heard walking slowly, lamp-lit passage by passage, as the guide moves through each decade.