Croton's Knot Mini-Sculpture

Ivan Firtsak wrestled bulls, drove nails into planks with the flat of his hand and let a car wheel be run across his throat. The circus billed him as Kroton, after Milo of Croton; at home in the Transcarpathian foothills they called him Ivan Syla — Ivan the Strength. In 1928 he was named the strongest man on the planet.

His monument in Uzhhorod contains no man at all. On the Kyivska embankment a section of the iron handrail has been tied in a knot, the way you would knot a wet towel, and left there among the ordinary balusters.

Chains, nails and a Ford

Firtsak was born in the village of Bilky in 1899 and spent his working life on the road — 64 countries, part of it with Prague's Herzfeld circus. He tore chains, bent reinforcing bar into hearts for the front rows and took a hammer blow to a beam laid across his chest. No source records who conferred that 1928 title; it stuck regardless, and at home the stories have been retold for a century.

One is documented rather than legendary. After the throat-and-wheel stunt in the United States, Ford gave him a car. Home in Transcarpathia, the authorities decided they wanted it. Firtsak took a sledgehammer to it rather than hand it over, and went to prison and a beating for the gesture.

Why a knot and not a strongman

The story attached to the sculpture picks up where the sledgehammer stops: out of the cells and still furious, Firtsak is said to have gone to an iron fence and tied it. Kolodko took that moment rather than the man — the strength by way of what it did, not the body that produced it. It is one of the very few Uzhhorod miniatures with no figure in it at all.

The knot appeared in 2014, its unveiling pegged to Ivan Syla, the Ukrainian feature about Firtsak that had reached cinemas the previous September with the strongman-athlete Dmytro Khaladzhi in the lead. Mykhailo Kolodko designed it; the blacksmith Vasyl Kryvanych did the forging, which is the harder half — knotted metal only convinces if it looks pulled rather than poured.

Where to look

Run your eye along the rail on Kyivska naberezhna at number 12, roughly 40m from the Švejk figure and on the same stretch of ironwork as the little Jihlava hedgehogs. For a second it reads as a fault in the fence rather than a sculpture, which is why most of the embankment walks straight past it. Touching it is the usual reflex — cold, and a good deal thicker than it looks in photographs.