Mykolaichyk Mini-Sculpture (St Nicholas's Helper)

The story Uzhhorod tells is that St Nicholas sat down one December to count the letters children had sent him and found that more had come from Uzhhorod than from anywhere else in Ukraine. Too many wishes for one saint. So he left a helper behind on a handrail by Theatre Square, to gather requests through the year and hand them up the chain each December.

The helper is Mykolaichyk, and he is the reason all the others exist. He went up on 19 December 2010 — St Nicholas Day, on the calendar Ukraine kept then — at the prompting of Fedir Shandor of the regional tourist organisation. Sixteen centimetres tall, twelve kilograms of solid bronze, and for a while the smallest sculpture in the country.

Rub the nose, and behave

The custom is simple: rub his nose and make a wish. Some people work the cap as well. There is one condition attached, and it is the condition you would expect from anything to do with St Nicholas — the wish counts only if you have behaved yourself for the year, and the helper has been keeping notes.

Fifteen years of palms have worn the nose to a bright gold against the dark bronze of the rest of him. You can see from ten paces how heavily the tradition gets used.

The one that started the collection

Mykhailo Kolodko's idea was plain enough: take sculpture out of the gallery and put it where people already walk — on railings, parapets and the edges of steps, at hand height rather than up on a plinth. Mykolaichyk was the trial run, and a modest one at that, sixteen centimetres of bronze bolted to a rail in the middle of town.

It worked. The bronzes kept coming, some sixty of them now, and Uzhhorod ended up with the largest collection of the things in Ukraine — Ferenc Liszt, a Rubik's Cube, Švejk, a fishing worm, a Statue of Liberty that doubles as a lighthouse — each carrying a story or a joke that only makes sense locally. People come to this city and spend a good part of it looking at railings.

Where to start

He sits by Theatre Square, in the thick of everything, a couple of minutes' walk from the pedestrian bridge and the run of embankment miniatures beyond it. Begin the hunt with him rather than finish it — he is the smallest thing on the list and the origin of the rest, and the polished nose makes him easy to pick out once you know what you are scanning for.