Eiffel Tower Mini-Sculpture

By 2015 Uzhhorod had one antique street lamp left standing, a cast-iron survivor on the corner of vul. Kapitulna and vul. Dukhnovycha, in the shadow of the Greek Catholic cathedral. The way Mykhailo Kolodko chose to protect it was not a preservation order. He bolted an Eiffel Tower to the top of it — bronze, 16cm high, about a kilogram.

The city presented it as the first public Eiffel Tower in Ukraine and the smallest anywhere. The Paris original rises 330m, which puts this one a shade past 1:2,000, and the reduction costs it almost nothing: the splayed lattice legs and the arch beneath the first platform are all there, legible from two metres away.

The consul came out for it

Kolodko unveiled the tower on 1 June 2015, timed to the Days of French Culture in Ukraine. European diplomats turned up, the French consul among them, which means a group of people in good coats once stood on a side street in Uzhhorod to watch a 16cm sculpture be revealed. Kolodko called it a marker of Ukrainian-French friendship — a large job description for a kilogram of bronze, but the gesture landed in a city that has spent most of its history facing west and saying so out loud.

The lamp it was made to save

The perch was the whole idea. According to Fedir Shandor, the Uzhhorod academic who set the miniature project going, the tower went up in order to rescue the city's last old street lamp — the logic being that a lamp with a landmark on it is a lamp nobody quietly takes down. Kapitulna is a short, quiet street of church property climbing toward the castle hill, and the pairing works on its own terms: municipal ironwork carrying a scale model of the most famous piece of ironwork in Europe.

Finding it

Look up. The tower sits near the top of the lamp, well above eye level, and people walk under it all day without registering it — the pleasure is entirely in the second your eye picks it out against the sky. Go when there is bright sky behind it; a lattice this fine vanishes into a grey one.

It is one of several dozen palm-sized bronzes Kolodko has been fixing to walls, railings and lampposts around central Uzhhorod since 2010, and one of the best-loved in the set. A border town in the Carpathians, holding the smallest Eiffel Tower in the world, on top of a lamp.