Ancient Blast Furnace, Massa Museum, Industrial monument in Miskolc, Hungary
The Ancient Blast Furnace (Újmassai őskohó) is a charcoal-fired iron smelting structure built in 1813 from rough stone on four corner pillars, with a base of 9.5 by 8.5 metres and a height of 11.4 metres. It has the form of a squat, two-tiered truncated pyramid, with basket-arch vaults on three sides; air was blown in through the east and west openings and iron was tapped through the north opening. The corner pillars were reinforced with steel tie rods.
Frigyes Fazola, a smelting engineer trained at Selmecbánya, built the furnace at Újmassa in 1813, and a reservoir, today's Hámori-tó, was created to drive the hammers. Production ran until 1866–1867, when iron smelting moved to the Diósgyőr–Miskolc area. Archduke István visited the works in 1847, and Sándor Petőfi also came and wrote an account of what he saw.
The furnace gave its name to the September Fazola Days, when a symbolic tapping is staged once a year and the restored water-powered forge hammer is set running for visitors. The Massa Museum beside the Garadna stream keeps the works' documents, period tools and finished iron products, and a stainless-steel memorial of 1988 recalls centuries of Czechoslovak-Hungarian cooperation among ironworkers.
The furnace stands beside the Garadna stream at the Újmassa-Őskohó stop of bus 15, and the Lillafüred narrow-gauge railway also stops here, but you must tell the conductor you want to get off. By car, turn off the Hámori-tó road toward Bánkút; the furnace is visible from the road and parking is free. The Massa Museum and the open-air collection of mining and metallurgical machinery lie across the road.
The reconstructed forge beside the furnace holds a water-powered tail hammer (farkaskalapács) built in 1979 from period documents; it is still started occasionally for visitors. The original tuyères were fed by a 7-metre waterwheel turning four bellows 16 strokes per minute.
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