Mykolaychik, Uzhhorod’s first mini-statue, on the Uzh embankment railing. Photo by Oleksa Yarys, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Along the river and through the courtyards of Uzhhorod, in western Ukraine, a trail of bronze figures a few centimetres tall sits on railings, gates and ledges. There are 83 of them, each marking a person, a joke or an anniversary, and a new one turns up every few months.
It began in December 2010 with Mykolaychik, a helper of St Nicholas, on the railing of the Uzh embankment at Teatralna Square. The idea came from Fedir Shandor, a professor at the city’s university, and the sculptor was Mykhailo Kolodko, born in Uzhhorod in 1978. The local custom is to rub Mykolaychik and make a wish, and in the photo above his cap has been polished gold. A ship, the Carpathia, was later moored next to him. It has a hollow hull: put a candle inside and the portholes glow.
Most of the early ones are Kolodko’s, and they reward looking closely. A tiny Statue of Liberty, which the operator MUSE Travel calls the world’s smallest replica, stands on a stair railing by the footbridge with a light flickering in its torch. Švejk holds a dumpling in his right hand; MUSE counts ten little Švejks in all, across Ukraine and central Europe. A Rubik’s cube marks the toy’s 40th anniversary. Harry Houdini, who according to MUSE had a grandmother from a village now in the Uzhhorod district, stands on a grated pedestal where visitors fasten their own padlocks. Warhol sits on a gate beside the Bokshay regional museum, honoured as a descendant of emigrants from the Lemko region. Franz Liszt has been stolen, splashed with paint and finally moved to a safer corner, where he sits on a tiny suitcase.
The other sculptors are named in MUSE’s listing too: Roman Murnyk made several, and Vasyl Kryvanych made a railing tied in a knot for a local strongman. The subjects keep widening: a Hungarian poet, a Cossack scout credited with popularising coffee in Vienna, a bronze customs officer with his guard dog (January 2026). A statue of a bearded soldier-professor lecturing from a trench, a meme from the war, appeared in 2022. The newest in MUSE’s listing is a 30 June 2026 statue of the physician Andriy Novak, in the courtyard of the regional hospital he led for decades.
Kolodko moved to Hungary and went on to scatter similar uncommissioned mini-statues around Budapest and other towns, which makes Uzhhorod the original. The statues are small enough to miss, which is the point. Most stand in the old town and can be reached on foot, and some, like Novak’s, are tucked into courtyards.
The practical limit: they are tiny, and Atlas Obscura’s page has no list of locations. MUSE Travel’s listing numbers the statues in order and is updated as new ones appear. Bring a patient eye, and count them as you go.