The Uzh Little Mermaid Mini-Sculpture

Hans Christian Andersen was buried on 11 August 1875, from the Church of Our Lady in Copenhagen. On 11 August 2023 Uzhhorod put up its mermaid — a palm of bronze bolted to the second pier of the footbridge over the Uzh, counting from the Petőfi Square bank, about a metre above the water.

She sits with her tail over the edge of the stone, in the pose everybody knows, and she is the most conditional sight in the city's collection. When the Uzh runs high you can only look at her from the bank. When it drops in a dry August she is nearly close enough to touch.

The statue she answers to

Copenhagen's mermaid exists because a brewer went to the ballet. Carl Jacobsen, of the Carlsberg family, saw Andersen's story danced at the Royal Theatre and in 1909 commissioned Edvard Eriksen to cast it; the ballerina Ellen Price lent her face but would not pose nude, so the body is the sculptor's wife, Eline. The result — 1.25 metres, 175 kilograms on a rock at Langelinie — was unveiled on 23 August 1913, and the Uzhhorod miniature landed in its 110th year. That is the anniversary the local announcements cited.

The tale is older than either. It was published on 7 April 1837 and has been read ever since as Andersen writing about a love he was never going to get. As for the two statues: the Danish one has been beheaded twice, lost an arm to a saw and been blown off her rock with explosives. Uzhhorod's worst enemy is the water table.

The Zakarpattia fleet

Local write-ups also read her as a nod to the Uzhhorod Regatta, and the reading holds up. It started in 2010 with eleven crews and turned into the loudest afternoon of the Uzhhorod summer: home-built rafts launched near the Pidzamkovyi bridge on the last Sunday of July, drifting down past this pier, judged on invention at least as much as on speed. Finishers are sworn into the Zakarpattia fleet by drinking water from an oar.

The race went quiet for five years before returning for its thirteenth running, dedicated to Ivan Divynets, the tourism scholar the crews called the fleet's admiral. The mermaid sits a metre above the course, which gives the fleet something to salute on the way past.

Finding her

From the bridge, look down at the second pier from the Petőfi Square end and lean over. The better angle is from the embankment on that same bank, where she comes into profile against the water — bring a zoom or you will go home with a photograph of a bridge support. Late summer is the season for it, for the obvious reason.

She is the fifty-seventh miniature in a city that has since counted past seventy, and she is by Roman Murnyk, who four months later set a working hourglass into the base of the bronze violinist on Kyivska naberezhna, a few metres from this bridge. The parapet above her carries Svobodka, thirty centimetres of Statue of Liberty with a lamp burning in the torch. It is a crowded stretch of railing.