Harry Houdini Mini-Sculpture

Harry Houdini told the world he was born on 6 April in Appleton, Wisconsin. He was born Erik Weisz on 24 March 1874, in Budapest, and the invented version stuck so well that Appleton still keeps him as a native son. Uzhhorod went with the true date: its bronze Houdini was unveiled on 24 March 2015, outside the door of the Hotel Uzhhorod on pl. Bohdana Khmelnytskoho.

He stands on a low pedestal, knee-high at most, wrists closed in irons. The irons are the working part of the sculpture — there is a gap in them sized to take a padlock, and people bring their own.

The man who turned getting out into an act

The Weisz family emigrated to the United States in 1878, and it was there that Erik became Houdini. Handcuffs, straitjackets, nailed packing crates, a jump into a river in chains, an escape while hanging head-down above a crowded street: he worked through every container a person can be shut into, then went looking for more. The mechanics mattered less than the staging. He let an audience talk itself into believing the box could not be opened, held them there a while, and then stepped out. His name went into ordinary speech in a dozen languages as the word for anyone who slips a trap.

The thread that leads here

So why a square in Transcarpathia? A grandmother. The account behind the sculpture holds that Houdini's grandmother came from Yovrya — the village now called Storozhnytsia, just outside Uzhhorod — and the road out to Storozhnytsia begins near where the bronze is bolted down, which is why Kolodko chose this corner and not another. Take it as local tradition rather than genealogy: the documented Weisz trail runs Budapest to Appleton and no further east. The tradition is the reason he is standing here at all.

Bring a padlock

Kolodko's stated idea is direct enough: Houdini got out of everything, so lock whatever is weighing on you into his shackles and walk off without it. Hundreds of travellers have done exactly that. It is a rare monument that asks something of you instead of holding still for a photograph — if you want to take part, buy the lock before you get there.

He is at pl. Bohdana Khmelnytskoho 2, level with the hotel entrance in the middle of town, a couple of minutes from the Uzh embankment. Of the several dozen palm-sized bronzes Kolodko has been fitting to the streets of Uzhhorod since 2010, most have to be hunted. This one is standing by a door, waiting to be let out.