Jon Lord Mini-Sculpture

Soviet radio would not play Deep Purple. Hungarian radio would, and Uzhhorod sits close enough to the border to have pulled in the signal cleanly. According to the people who put this sculpture up, the band's first records travelled onward into the rest of the USSR from here — taped off Hungarian airwaves in a border town most of the country would never see.

Which is how Jon Lord, an English organist from Leicester, came to be sitting in bronze on the Nezalezhnosti embankment in waistcoat and teardrop shades, cigarette in hand, back to the street and face to the river.

The organ under the riff

Lord co-founded Deep Purple in 1968 and played Hammond organ through the band's loudest decade. That saturated, overdriven keyboard tone is his, and it carries as much of Smoke on the Water as the guitar figure everyone can hum. He had a classical training and never stopped dragging it into rock, stayed with the band on and off until 2002, and died on 16 July 2012, aged 71. The Uzhhorod idea started that same summer.

Why his back is turned

Two explanations circulate on the embankment. In one, Lord came to Uzhhorod, thought little of the architecture and turned his bronze back on Korzo in protest. In the other he met a woman by the Uzh and is still watching the water. A local book pushes further and has him writing Smoke on the Water here in 1970. He did not: the song is about a flare gun fired into the roof of the Montreux Casino on 4 December 1971, and the smoke that drifted from it across Lake Geneva while the band watched from their hotel.

One piece of the folklore has a practical result. Rub the bronze glasses and you will find your true love, so the glasses are the brightest thing on the figure.

Paid for in coins

The money came out of a collection tin in the café Pid Zamkom, filling up from 2012 onwards: 584 hryvnias in small change, about 16kg of it, with a few Egyptian pounds and Russian roubles in the pile by the time anyone counted. Casting the figure from the coins themselves was considered and dropped in favour of bronze, which behaves better. Mykhailo Kolodko made it — his eleventh miniature in the city — and it was unveiled on 27 November 2014, on a morning when the Uzh happened to be under fog.

Finding him

North bank, Nezalezhnosti embankment, opposite the gymnasium, near the start of the linden alley — 2.2km of limes put in by Czech botanists in 1928 for the tenth anniversary of Czechoslovakia, and counted the longest avenue of its kind in Europe. He sits a little off the walking line, so allow a few minutes of looking. Cross the pedestrian bridge and Švejk and Croton's Knot are on the far bank within about five minutes.