Krisztina Csáky and Miklós Bercsényi Mini-Sculpture

They married on 11 June 1695. Krisztina Csáky was forty, twice widowed and the daughter of the Lord Chief Justice of Hungary; Miklós Bercsényi was eleven years her junior and had just inherited, by way of a first wife who died young, one of the largest fortunes in the kingdom. The prize at the centre of it was Uzhhorod Castle, and for the next sixteen years the two of them ran it.

Their bronze doubles sit on the embankment railing on the south bank of the Uzh, a few doors from the Hungarian consulate, turned toward the castle hill across the water. Both would fit in a cupped hand.

What they did with the castle

The Drugeth family had held Uzhhorod for three and a half centuries, and when their male line ended in 1691 the estates passed to Bercsényi through his marriage to Krisztina Drugeth. He took possession in 1692 and began spending. A French military engineer, Lemaire, was brought in to rework the defences; the fortified palace inside the walls was rebuilt in the late-Renaissance manner of northern Hungary, which is broadly the shape you see today.

Krisztina Csáky ran the household, raised her stepchildren and turned the place into a fixture of aristocratic Hungary — balls, house guests, music, a small court on the edge of the Carpathians. Serious business went on in the same rooms. Bercsényi received envoys from Peter the Great and from Louis XIV here, feeling out an anti-Habsburg alliance, and when Ferenc II Rákóczi raised his standard in 1703 the count became commander-in-chief of the uprising and, from 1707, the prince's deputy.

Exile, and a long way back

The rising failed. The couple left Hungary in 1711, the crown confiscated everything, and the castle passed eventually to the Greek Catholic Church, which put a school in it. Five years in Brzeżany in Poland were followed by exile at Rodostó — Tekirdağ, on the Sea of Marmara — among the last of the Rákóczi émigrés. Krisztina died there on 23 April 1723. Bercsényi followed two years later.

Neither of them saw Uzhhorod again. Their remains were repatriated in 1906, along with Rákóczi's, and reburied on 29 October in St Elizabeth's Cathedral in Košice — close to the castle they rebuilt, but on the other side of what is now the Slovak border.

The city's only double miniature

Mykhailo Kolodko unveiled the pair on 14 December 2015, presented by the Pannonia socio-cultural association together with the Hungarian consulate. Of the several dozen bronzes Kolodko has planted along this river since 2010, it is still the only one with two people in it — which is the point. The subject is a marriage; neither half explains the castle alone.

Finding them

Work along the railing of Pravoslavna naberezhna, opposite the Transcarpathian Regional Philharmonic — the neo-Moorish former synagogue of 1904 on the far bank — near the Hungarian consulate at No. 12. Walk it slowly. At this scale you can pass a figure twice before your eye catches it.

From the railing it is a short walk over the pedestrian bridge and up the hill to the castle itself, which is the right order to do it in: the people first, then the house.