Sergei Parajanov Mini-Sculpture

For most of a month in the early 1960s Sergei Parajanov lived in a flat in Uzhhorod, arguing over a screenplay and learning to cook dolma from his host's wife. The host was the Transcarpathian writer Ivan Chendei. The screenplay was Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, and the film that came out of that month still sits first on the standard list of the hundred best Ukrainian films ever made.

That is the whole reason there is a bronze Parajanov standing near the Uzhhorod drama theatre.

A month in Chendei's flat

Parajanov was born in Tbilisi in January 1924 to Armenian parents and had no particular claim on the Carpathians when he took up Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky's 1911 novella. Chendei did. Born in the village of Dubove in 1922 and a Transcarpathian for the whole of his life, he co-wrote the script, and the two of them worked it out here before the production moved east to Kryvorivnia, the Hutsul village where the film was shot. It reached screens in 1965 and did not sound like anything else coming out of the Soviet Union: Ukrainian dialogue left undubbed rather than replaced with Russian, Yuri Illienko's camera handheld and loose.

Chendei's reward was to be deleted. When he fell out of official favour — in part for backing the dissident Ivan Dziuba — his name came off the film's credits. It went back on eventually, followed by the Shevchenko Prize in 1994, and he died in Uzhhorod in 2005.

Stone, reel, pomegranate

The composition runs on three objects. Underneath sits a block of granite, which its makers read as the director's refusal to break under the Soviet state — not a figure of speech in his case. He was arrested in Kyiv in December 1973, sentenced to five years of hard labour and served four, then arrested again in 1982. Beside him stands a reel of film with a letter engraved on it. In his hands he holds a pomegranate.

The fruit points at The Color of Pomegranates, his 1969 film about the Armenian poet Sayat-Nova, which the censors banned, then re-cut and renamed, and which has since worked its way onto most serious lists of the century's essential cinema. Granite at the bottom, pomegranate at the top: that is the persecution and the pictures, in about thirty centimetres.

Finding it

It is in the centre, beside the Sherehii Brothers regional drama theatre and a few steps from the memorial to the victims of the Armenian genocide. The two were meant to be seen together; the sculpture was pushed through by a city councillor, Arsen Melkumyan. Coordinates 48.621711, 22.293805 will put you within a metre of it, and the rest is down to your eyes.

It went up in April 2024, the year of Parajanov's centenary, as the sixty-sixth of Uzhhorod's bronzes — Mykhailo Kolodko began the series in 2010, and Roman Murnyk made this one along with much of what has come since. Watch one Parajanov film before you travel. The pomegranate will do more for you than any plaque.