Rubik's Cube Mini-Sculpture

Uzhhorod's Rubik's Cube is not, strictly speaking, a miniature. Every other bronze along this stretch of river has been shrunk to the size of a thumb; the cube was cast at the dimensions of the real thing — about a kilogram of metal, sitting on a stair rail as though someone had set it down mid-solve and wandered off.

It went up on 22 December 2014, forty years after Ernő Rubik built the first one.

A month to solve his own puzzle

Rubik was teaching design and architecture at the Academy of Applied Arts in Budapest when he made it, and he was not setting out to invent a toy. He was chasing a structural problem: how to let a great many small parts move independently and still hold together as one body. The puzzle arrived as a by-product. Having built the thing, he needed roughly a month of trial and error to get it back to six solid faces, and that was when he understood what he was holding.

He filed for a Hungarian patent on 30 January 1975, under the name bűvös kocka — Magic Cube. Ideal Toy took it worldwide in 1980, under his surname. There are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 ways to arrange the thing and exactly one that counts. Around half a billion have been sold.

Why a Hungarian puzzle sits in Ukraine

Rubik has no family here. He was born in Budapest in 1944; his father, a designer of gliders, came from Pöstyén, now Piešťany in Slovakia. The connection is more local than a bloodline. Transcarpathia is Ukraine's Hungarian-speaking corner, Hungary's consulate general stands a hundred paces along the same embankment, and the flight of steps the cube sits on is known to everyone in town as the consular stairs. The consul general came to the unveiling. A Hungarian invention on the consular stairs needs no further argument.

The fisherman and the cube

A story goes with it, and guides deliver it deadpan. In 1976 Rubik came to Uzhhorod to show off his puzzle, was charmed by the place, and standing on these very steps took the cube from his pocket and threw it into the Uzh — a promise to himself that he would have to come back for it. Overnight the plastic turned to metal. A local fisherman landed it the next morning, and the town fixed it to the railing on the spot where he had stood.

None of it happened. The legend was written after the sculpture rather than before it, and it turns up in Nadiia Popadiuk's collection of Uzhhorod stories. Backfilling its own folklore is something this city does with unusual conviction.

Finding it

The consular stairs drop from Pravoslavna naberezhna to the pedestrian bridge over the Uzh. The cube is on the handrail, a few steps from Svobodka — billed as the world's smallest copy of the Statue of Liberty, up since 2011, with a live bulb in her torch that makes her a working beacon.

Mykhailo Kolodko cast the cube not in Ukraine but in Debrecen, across the Hungarian border, which is about as neat a detail as the whole arrangement deserves. Between those two figures you have the character of the entire Uzhhorod collection inside a metre of railing.