Community park
Site IDs: 65154, 34289
Keywords: Middle Ages, Árpádian Age, 13th century, Late Middle Ages, 14th century, Early Modern Period, Ottoman Period, 16th–17th centuries, settlement, village, building, Modern Period, cellar
Between July 6 and September 3, 2020, the Medieval Department of the Budapest History Museum conducted a full-scale excavation at the site located at 1-11 Bástya Street, District V, Budapest, in advance of the construction of a planned community park.
The northern part of the site, which had already been partially excavated by Judit Zádor in 2000–2001 and lies further from the city wall, covered an area of 230 m². Excavation took place below the floor level of demolished 19th-century cellars, within the walls of those structures. As the earlier layers had been destroyed down to a depth of 101.30 a.B.S.l. (above Baltic Sea level) from the current average ground level of 103.50 a.B.S.l. by the modern cellars, we were only able to excavate 45 features that appeared in the subsoil.
During the excavation, we uncovered parts of the medieval village of Szenterzsébet from the Late Árpádian Age (13th century), including ditches and pits (Fig. 1), sporadic features from the Late Middle Ages (14th century), and remains of a small Ottoman-period (16th–17th century) structure – a rectangular building with stone-reinforced postholes (Fig. 2).
Finds consisted of period-typical pottery and animal bones. Noteworthy artifacts included a 14th-century fragment of a spouted vessel decorated with an animal head, and a fragment of an aquamanile likely shaped like a large feline.
Despite these recent excavations, the area has not yet been fully explored.
Contributors: Anikó Tóth (lead archaeologist), Tamás Szolnoki (archaeologist), Zsolt Kevevári (surveyor), Zsolt Viemann (surveyor)
Anikó Tóth