The Hourglass Mini-Sculpture

Sculptors do not usually put moving parts in street monuments. This one did. Set into the steel base below Uzhhorod's bronze violinist on Kyivska Naberezhna is a real hourglass, and the sand inside it runs — which is why the city calls the whole composition the Hourglass rather than the name of the man standing over it.

Roman Murnyk finished it for 13 December 2023, International Violin Day, and put it on the embankment a few metres from the pedestrian bridge. The figure is a miniature, knee height at most. The timer underneath is the part that stops people.

Two kinds of time in one object

The sculpture holds two contradictory ideas and does not resolve them. The bronze half is time stopped: a man fixed mid-phrase with a violin, and he will be doing that in fifty years. The glass half is time running, in the most literal form anyone has devised for it, grain after grain, in public, on a riverbank.

The subject makes the joke sharper. Plotényi was well known across Europe in his lifetime and is now a name for local historians; Uzhhorod even named this stretch of riverbank after him in 1934 and then took the name off again within a decade. A monument that quietly measures out its own subject's forgetting is a strange thing to build, and it is more interesting than a plaque.

Reading the violin

Everything else in the piece is packed into the instrument. It is oversized and strung with three strings, not four, with letters cut into the pegs for Stradivari, Guarneri and Amati — the three makers whose violins Plotényi actually owned. Its outline carries two more readings: a woman leaning into him, for his wife Eugenia MacAlister, and the silhouette of a brandy glass and bottle, for the distillery and vineyards that paid for all of it at Velyki Lazy, the village where he was born.

The short version of the man: born 1844, found in Mukachevo at eighteen by the virtuoso Ede Reményi, taught by him, toured Europe with him, host to Liszt and Brahms at his own estate, dead in 1933.

Seeing it properly

Walk the Kyivska Naberezhna bank towards the pedestrian bridge and look down rather than ahead; this is a miniature and it sits low. Then stay for the minute or so it takes the sand to finish. That is not a suggestion about mindfulness — the piece has a duration built into it, and anyone who photographs it and walks on has seen half the sculpture.

It is one of the newer arrivals in a collection Uzhhorod started in 2010, when professor Fedir Shandor proposed scattering hand-sized monuments through the city. There are more than fifty in the centre now and over a hundred across Zakarpattia.