Bányász Cave

The Bányász Cave is one of the specially protected caves of Hungary. It is the deepest cave in Hungary. In the Bükki National Park, on the Bükk plateau, west of Lillafüred, halfway between the Menyecske sinkhole and the Közép mountain, on the north side of Lendeczky road, the Bányász Cave is located. The cave also appears in tourist guidebooks.

Formation

The passages are filled with middle Triassic Bükk plateau limestone. The passages are mainly parallel, vertical shafts, short, steep connecting sections and collapse labyrinths, with false floors. Mostly, recognizably along the limestone structural planes striking EN–DN and inclined about 80°. This structural direction also appears on the geological map. According to Pál Pelikán, this structure is a thrust sheet formed during the first significant metamorphism of the mountain in the middle Cretaceous. The structures oriented EN–DK play a subordinate role, with a few connecting sections of shafts and one or two passages of the Róka branch developing in them.

The cave was primarily formed by the dissolving action of waters that once drained toward the Szinva spring. From the current endpoint to the Herman horn, several characteristic swamp shafts follow each other, with the water flowing on the walls leaving characteristic dissolutional formations. These are linked by impassably narrow meandering passages. The shafts are almost textbook examples of Ivo Baron's swamp formation theory.

The formation of the section that starts under the Entrance shaft and runs through the Bottomless shaft to the Fox branch, Herman pipe branch is difficult to explain. The Bottomless shaft is not a typical collapse shaft in several respects. It descends mostly very steeply, with few vertical sections. Its cross‑sections clearly show that, compared with the fractures directing the passage, the passage also extends into the ceiling, often more extensively than into the floor (the flowing waters mainly erode the floor, dissolve it). The walls are covered with characteristic semicircular, highly rounded forms typical of underwater dissolution. Near the middle of the shaft, above the Ledge, a deep dissolution sink likely indicating an ancient water level can be seen. These morphological features indicate that this shaft formed below the karst water table and may be considerably older than other parts of the cave.

The lower part of the cave is still actively developing today. In the shafts there are dripping and trickling waters throughout the year; they have not been seen during floods, but according to the group reports, work was halted here after a flash flood that washed away the debris of the collapses. This observation and the clean, washed surfaces of the cave walls call for caution among researchers.

Formations

The cave’s variety of forms is diverse: fissure-like and dissolution forms also occur. It is rich in stalactites, but the dissolution of formations is a common phenomenon. Particularly common are stalactite curtains, flowstones, flowstones cemented with stalactite material, and limestone debris. Already in the first shaft, directly under the entrance, there are flowstone formations, indicating that part of the shaft was previously destroyed. This is further confirmed by the fact that the blocks of stone forming a constriction at the bottom are recognizable as former cubic-meter blocks of stalactites.

The walls contain crusts that have melted away and then been re‑glued with new stalactite deposits in the Stalactite‑Horn. Similar phenomena in the Little‑Stone‑House‑Pit have been explained by freezing effects during colder climatic periods (even glacial). The walls of the Bottomless‑Pit are decorated with stalactite flow, but on the new sections the over‑growing, half‑blade‑sharp stone‑spike sections and the re‑dissolved stalactites alternate. This indicates that at some time this section also became inactive, but later aggressive, dissolving water began to flow through it again. Similar perforated, layered, corroded stalactites were observed in the Mecsek Spiral water‑collector’s 2008 new section.

Name

In 1977 the cave was first called Bányász Cave in the literature. The cave appears in the literature under the names Bányász Cave (Takácsné, Eszterhás, Juhász, Kraus 1989), Bányász Cave of Középbérc (Kordos 1977), Hársas Cave (Kordos 1977), Hársas‑Cave (Kordos 1977), hársasi Bányász Cave (Kordos 1984), Középbérci Bányász Cave (Kordos 1977), Közép‑bérci‑cave (Lénárt 1979), Kurtabérci Cave (Kordos 1984), Nagy‑Hársas Cave (Lénárt 1979), Nagy‑Hársasi Pit (Takácsné 1987) and Nagy‑Hársas Pit (Kordos 1977).

Research history

The cave has been open since human memory. Its exploration was begun by the Miskolc Miners Cave Research Group in 1963. The filling of the Passage‑Pit was excavated from the entire 7 m² section up to the surface. During the exploration it became evident that the pit was most heavily filled in historic times, as a large amount of recent bone remains were found, including a complete human skeleton from the 1910s. The skeleton was recovered from a depth of 11.5 m, beneath 7 m of thick debris.

At a depth of 24 m they reached a gap that remained unfilled beside the bulging large stone blocks, into which, sliding down, they could descend unobstructed through two shafts to a depth of 120 m, according to current surveys to a depth of 80 m, to the Omladékos chamber, from which, according to the report, they broke down a further section of about 10 m downwards, to a depth of 130 m in the debris (87 m), but they gave up the exploration because of a water inflow.

In 1975 the Herman Ottó Karst and Cave Research Group mapped the Zsomboly. After two hours of digging through the clogged constriction at the bottom of the First shaft they successfully descended to a depth of 87 m, where they did not find the Omladékos chamber. However, not far before the then terminal point they managed to widen an upward‑opening, drafty crack, from which they entered a much larger trumpet system running parallel to the descending shaft series, later named the Herman trumpet in their honor.