The Jihlava Hedgehogs

Jihlava, a Czech silver-mining town on the old Bohemia–Moravia border, keeps a hedgehog on its coat of arms and another on its beer labels. Roughly 500km east, three of them are welded to a railing on Uzhhorod's Kyivska embankment, opposite School No. 5 — palm-sized, bronze, and the least official-looking piece of municipal diplomacy on the river.

The two cities have been twinned since 2010. In May 2013, during a week of Czech culture in Uzhhorod, the sculptor Mykhailo Kolodko and the blacksmith Vasyl Kryvanych fixed the hedgehogs to the rail, and the mayors of both towns came to watch it done.

Why a hedgehog

Jihlava's German name was Iglau, and Igel is German for hedgehog, which makes the animal a pun on the town. The pun came second: the name is older than the emblem, and a competing derivation traces it to the Slavic jehla, “needle”, for the sharp stones in the Jihlava riverbed. Czech tradition prefers the version in which a hedgehog once saved the place outright. However it began, the creature has been Jihlava's ever since.

It also sells beer. The city brewery's flagship lager is Ježek — hedgehog — so in Czech hands the animal means the town and a glass of its lager at once. The Uzhhorod miniature carries both meanings across two borders.

Four were cast, three are left

The original group had four animals. The smallest was handed to the mayor of Jihlava as a gift in return and went home in his luggage, which is why the family on the railing is one short of its own history. The survivors sit at hand height near the start of the fencing, low enough that children reach them without being lifted — the reason this is among the most photographed miniatures in a city with plenty of competition.

The tale the city wrote for them

Uzhhorod has since given the hedgehogs a backstory of their own. In Nadiya Popadiuk's book on the city's miniatures, hedgehogs once stood guard over the building of the medieval rotunda at Horiany; word of them reached Přemysl Otakar II, the founder of Jihlava, who bought 300 hedgehogs for 300 silver coins to protect his own town; centuries later a sculptor melted the coins down into the three bronzes on the embankment. None of that is history, and it is not offered as history. It is a story written for people out hunting miniatures, and it does the quiet work of tying a Czech emblem to a landmark on Uzhhorod's own outskirts.

Finding them

Kyivska embankment, on the metal railing opposite School No. 5, near where the run of fencing begins — 48.6223, 22.2940. Look down rather than up. Everything in this series sits below eye level, and the hedgehogs are dark bronze on dark metal.

Kolodko started bolting small bronzes onto Uzhhorod's street furniture more than a decade ago, mostly without asking permission first, and the city ended up adopting the habit as a brand. Most of the miniatures commemorate a person or land a joke about Zakarpattia. These ones commemorate a friendship, and of the whole hunt they are the easiest to warm to.