Kukots Mini-Sculpture (the Fisherman's Worm)

Transcarpathian anglers will not set out without rubbing the nose of a bronze worm on the Botanical embankment. The worm is Kukots, the nose is plainly too big for his face, and the two facts are connected: Mykhailo Kolodko oversized it on purpose, calculating that a few hundred thumbs a year would sand it back to the proper proportions in time. It is not there yet. The nose is polished to a hard gold while the rest of him stays dark, which is a fair measure of how many people have gone fishing on his say-so.

The deal, as the fishermen have it, is that the rub guarantees a bite.

Főkukac, and how he got here

Kukots is a Ukrainian ear's version of kukac — Hungarian for maggot, and the standard thing on the end of a hook around here. The specific maggot is Főkukac, the plump and frequently unwilling sidekick to the hero of A Nagy Ho-ho-ho-horgász, ‘The Great Ho-Ho-Ho Fisherman’: twenty-six episodes written by István Csukás and drawn by Ferenc Sajdik, made in Budapest between 1984 and 1990.

It was never a Ukrainian cartoon, and that is the point. Uzhhorod sits within easy reach of the Hungarian and Czechoslovak transmitters, and the children who watched Főkukac wrestle a fishing rod are now the adults who recognise a small bronze worm on sight and explain him to their own children. Kolodko builds a lot of his miniatures on exactly that kind of recognition — an image that means nothing to a visitor and everything to the person who grew up here.

The right stretch of river

The siting is exact. This length of the Botanical embankment, below the Philharmonic and a few steps from the pedestrian bridge, is where Uzhhorod actually fishes — in the warm months people sit out along the wall with rods, directly underneath him. A mascot for anglers was put where the anglers are rather than where the tour groups pass. The tour groups came anyway.

Stolen, and back on his post

He arrived on a November evening in 2016, the twenty-seventh miniature in the run of palm-sized bronzes Kolodko has been screwing to this city's railings since 2010. He has not stayed put the whole time: Kukots was lifted at one point and later restored to his spot, which has happened to more than one of these figures over the years.

He is back on the rail. If you are going anywhere near water that day, rub the nose.