The Tour Guide Mini-Sculpture

Taras Haiduk was killed near Orikhiv, in Zaporizhzhia oblast, on 6 March 2022 — eleven days into the full-scale invasion. He was thirty-one, an Uzhhorod guide and historian who had already done three years of contract service and a tour in the east before this war reached him. On what would have been his thirty-third birthday, 24 October 2023, the city set a small bronze guide at work outside the gates of the university botanical garden.

The figure has one hand raised, mid-sentence, addressing a group that is not there.

Three guides

The sculpture is Haiduk in particular and the profession in general. Two other Transcarpathian guides are named alongside him. Bohdan Khodanych, born in Uzhhorod in 1970, served as a rifleman with the 101st Territorial Defence Brigade and was killed on 11 May 2023. Ivan Divynets is the third. Haiduk was given the Order For Courage posthumously.

Guiding is a small trade in a small region, and the people who do it largely know one another; losing three of them registered. The bronze was the answer the tourism community was in a position to make.

The pedestal is a bicycle rack

There is no plinth. The base is a working bike rack, its bars cut to the profile of the highest Carpathian peaks, and the guide stands on the tallest of them with a short flight of steps running up to him. The people who put it there describe those steps as a sign of gratitude and of remembrance.

Cyclists do lock up to it. The design plainly expected them to.

Out at the botanical garden

It stands at vul. Olbrakhta 6, by the entrance to the Botanical Garden of Uzhhorod National University, at 48.620137, 22.304674. That is well east of the embankments where most of the city's miniatures live, so reaching it takes a deliberate walk rather than a lucky one — give the garden itself an hour while you are up there, if only for the giant sequoia planted in the early 1950s.

This is the sixty-first figure in a collection that mostly deals in wit and wordplay. The sculptor named most often is Roman Murnyk, who has made much of the recent run. Nothing about this one is a joke, and it does not read like its neighbours.