Mykola Shuhai Mini-Sculpture

Mykola Shuhai was an outlaw for a little over a year. He has been a legend for a century. The career ended on 16 August 1921, and not at the hands of a gendarme — three men from his own band got him drunk, killed him and his younger brother Yurii with axes, and then went to fetch the authorities and claim the reward standing on his head. He was twenty-three.

The bronze on vul. Ivana Olbrakhta gives him none of that. A small figure in an embroidered shirt sits on a café railing with a rifle held across his body, a few minutes below the castle, looking like a man who has just walked out of the treeline.

What the record says

He was born on 3 April 1898 in Nyzhnia Kolochava, up the Terebla valley. Called up in 1917 into the 85th regiment, he deserted before he ever reached the front and spent the rest of the war in the mountains. He came back around 1920 to a region that had changed countries while he was hiding in it — Subcarpathian Rus was now the eastern end of Czechoslovakia — and put a band together.

What followed was cheese lifted from shepherds' huts on the high pastures, merchants robbed on the roads and, later, churches. The redistribution the songs credit him with is not in the record; he robbed the rich and kept it. Gendarmes chased him for months and never took him. His own men managed it in an evening.

The novel did the rest

Ivan Olbracht — the pen name of Kamil Zeman, a Czech writer and journalist — first came out to Subcarpathian Rus in 1931, ten years after Shuhai was in the ground. He never met the man. He worked from what villagers in Kolochava told him, and in 1933 published Nikola Šuhaj loupežník. The outlaw in the book is bullet-proof, in love, and open-handed with what he takes, and that is the version that crossed borders. Olbracht kept writing about the region afterwards — Hory a staletí in 1935, Golet v údolí in 1937 — and Kolochava keeps a memorial to him for it.

Uzhhorod named a street after the writer. The statuette of his subject then went up on that street, at number 3, which leaves the robber permanently lodged at his chronicler's address rather than the other way about.

Finding it

The address is vul. Ivana Olbrakhta 3, on the railing outside Pid Zamkom — ‘Under the Castle’, the oldest café in town — on the walk up to Uzhhorod Castle. Take an outside table and the figure is at your elbow; most people find it that way rather than by hunting.

It went up on the last day of January 2015. The sculptor is Mykhailo Kolodko, who has been fixing palm-sized bronzes to Uzhhorod's railings, walls and kerbs since 2010 and is now well past a hundred of them. Kolochava is a long way east, up the Terebla valley, and the story has been its main export ever since.