Buffalo Bill

Buffalo Bill's Wild West played Ungvár on 27 June 1906: two performances in a single day, roughly 1,300 people and animals, and a Habsburg county town at the foot of the Carpathians watching Lakota riders and trick shooters at close range. William Frederick Cody was on the bill in person.

Local historians turned the archive record up a century later, and the bronze on Kyivska Naberezhna exists because of what they found.

How the frontier reached the Uzh

The company landed at Trieste on 12 May 1906 and spent the summer working across Austria-Hungary. Vienna and Budapest got weeks — the Budapest run went eight days straight and still turned people away — after which the show went out into the provinces for thirty consecutive days of one-town stands. It moved on fifty railway cars, eighteen of them carrying stock. Ungvár was one night on that circuit.

The tour manager, Charles Eldridge Griffin, thought rural Hungary a poor market: it was harvest, the farmers were in the fields, and seats stayed empty. Uzhhorod, by local accounts, talked about its two shows for years afterwards.

Two men who never shared this stage

Emma Rusyn, the Uzhhorod sculptor who made the piece, put two figures into it: Cody and Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull rode with the Wild West for exactly one four-month season, in 1885, at $50 a week plus whatever he took selling his own autograph, and he was shot dead by Indian police at Standing Rock in December 1890 — fifteen years before the troupe reached this river. Rusyn has singled him out as the figure that interested her most. The bronze is not a cast list; it is the two faces the show is remembered by.

It also has a back. Turn it round and there is a plan of Uzhhorod's 1906 town limits marking where the arena stood, a detail worked out with the historian Ihor Prokhnenko — which is why the sculpture sits about where the crowd did.

The one that talks

Point a phone at the QR code beside it and Cody introduces himself, in Ukrainian and in English. The voice is Mykola Karpenko of the Zakarpattia regional puppet theatre Bavka, which is why it sounds like a man having a good time. This was the first of Uzhhorod's miniatures to do anything other than sit there — the city has been putting them out since 2010, sixty-odd by now, and the rest are silent.

The Andriy Piven charitable foundation commissioned and paid for it, and it was unveiled on 6 July 2021. There is an alarm built in that can call the police if somebody starts working at it with a tool, which tells you something about the practicalities of leaving small bronzes on public railings.

Where to find it

Kyivska Naberezhna 20, at the Masaryk bridge end of the embankment beside the Uzhhorod hotel. Walk east along the river and you pass Švejk and then, at the pedestrian bridge, the violinist Nándor Plotényi — a fictional Czech infantryman, a Hungarian count and an American showman inside a kilometre, which is a fair summary of what this town has been through.