Strázsa-hegy Cave

Strázsa-hegy Cave is one of the caves in Hungary that are highly protected. It is located in the Pilis Mountains within the Danube–Ipoly National Park. Archaeological and paleontological finds have been recovered from it.

Description

In the Pilis Mountains, on the Danube side of Nagy-Strázsa-hegy (Strázsa-hegy), in the Esztergom-Kertváros district, on the hillside, in the forest, it is located in an easily accessible place. It opens at the foot of a rock wall about 40 m from the Sátorkőpuszta cave, at an altitude of 285 m above sea level. Its easily reachable and visible entrance, which faces the Danube and can be seen from a distance, naturally opened and is called the Fairy Gate and Angel's Gate. It is rare for water‑origin caves to have a naturally opened entrance. The large entrance is about 7–9 m high and 7 m wide, natural, triangular, and oriented horizontally.

Dry, ruined, deteriorating cave. It consists of a large, impressive entrance hall with an area of about 200 m² in which corrosion forms can be observed. It opens to the surface with large openings. The hall’s ceiling is open in three parts and its side is also open. It formed in Upper Triassic Dachstein limestone. One part is freely accessible and no lamp is needed to enter this part. Its closed sections can be visited with permission from the Danube–Ipoly National Park Directorate.

The Esztergom Sátorkőpuszta was named after this cave. In its fill, pottery shards and hearth traces, as well as a vertebrate fauna consisting of 42 species, were found. This number, however, is not exact because only a small part of the bird bones has been identified.

In 1964 the cave was first called Strázsa-hegyi-barlang in the literature (Schőnviszky 1964). The cave appears in the literature as “second Sátorkői cave” (Takácsné 2003), Second Sátorkőpusztai cave (Bertalan 1976), Second Sátorkő-pusztai-cave (Kraus 2002), Strázsa-cave (Kadić 1922–1925, Véghelyi 1922–1925), Strázsahegyi-cave (Barátosi 1959), Strázsahegyi cave (Bekey 1931) and Sztrázsa-cave (Kadić 1952).

Research history

According to the book published in 1908 that describes Esztergom county, no traces of cave dwellers were found in Esztergom county because there are no caves that contain traces indicating that ancient people once lived in them. The first settlers came to this region with more advanced needs; besides tools made of animal bones and antler, they also used stone tools. Therefore they were not forced to live in caves or dug-out hollows, but could make tents and huts. The caves or dug-out hollows that are still numerous in forests or in remote, hard-to-reach areas and contain traces of human culture could not have been ancient human dwellings. They were mainly hideouts from the time of the Tatar invasion and Turkish destruction, because the objects found in them cannot be traced back to prehistoric times.

In the summer of 1920 and the summer of 1921 Lajos Véghelyi carried out trial excavations in the cave. In these two years he produced a plan view cave map and a longitudinal‑section cave map, which were drawn at a scale of 1:133. The plan view cave map marks the east direction, the projection of the shafts opening to the surface, the area of the trial pit and the area of the systematic excavation as well. The longitudinal‑section cave map depicts the cave along its main axis. The trial excavation that took place in 1921 was at the most promising location, in the rear part of the cave. Here a light ochre‑yellow loose material was produced, consisting mainly of quartz sand, injected dust and fine lime flour falling from the ceiling. This sediment was not formed entirely in situ and is most comparable to the type of sediment that Tivadar Kormos calls modern loess.

Since the trial excavation proved that the area was suitable for digging, systematic excavation was carried out in the summer of 1922, which Lajos Véghelyi performed together with Ottó Kadić and András Tasnádi Kubacska, and which lasted with longer intervals from May to August. The systematic excavation took place in the Antechamber, and although in some places they reached a depth of 2.5 m, they never reached the bottom at any point. The roughly 30 m³ of material removed from here formed a wedge‑shaped pit. One wall of the pit is oriented in the same direction as the cave’s main axis, and seven well‑separated layers of the fill could be distinguished along this section. The uppermost member of the layer group is black forest humus mixed with limestone fragments, whose thickness along the main axis varies between 0.75 m and 1 m. Perpendicular to this, it thins toward the wall, clearly showing the direction of the infiltration and the origin of its material.

Several clay lumps completely embedded in humus were recovered from this layer during excavation, which therefore fell already in the Holocene, from which it can be concluded that at the end of the Pleistocene the stalagmites were much smaller. The humus was then the layer richest in remains for the infill. Directly below the humus follows a 0.43 m thick sand layer, which consists of fine, uniform grains and resembles the bankside sand of rivers. Its colour is mainly grey. It begins about 2 m from the entrance and thickens inward along the main axis, with a slight curvature following the rise of the surface. The sand layer is certainly not formed in situ, but was washed in by water, or is aeolian. Below the sand layer lies a 0.55 m thick marl-rich clay, thickening towards the interior of the cave. Its material comes from the cave vault. During excavation this layer, together with its horizontal layers, was always damp even in the driest weather.