Svobodka Mini-Sculpture (Ungvar Lighthouse)

The Statue of Liberty in New York harbour was raised to meet the boats coming in. Uzhhorod's Liberty was made for the opposite errand. She is thirty centimetres of bronze, four kilograms, standing on the parapet where the pedestrian bridge crosses the Uzh, with a red LED set into her torch that comes on after dark. Transcarpathia has been sending its people abroad for work for generations, and locals read that small red spark as a signal aimed back at them.

Her official name is the Ungvar Lighthouse — Ungvár being what Hungarians have always called this city — and almost nobody uses it. To Uzhhorod she is Svobodka, ‘little Liberty’. The city claims her as both the smallest copy of the Statue of Liberty anywhere and the smallest lighthouse in working order.

A beacon for a raft race

She went up in July 2011, timed to the Uzhhorod Regatta — the summer event in which locals put homemade boats on the river and find out which ones survive the current. Commissioning a lighthouse for a fleet of improvised rafts is a joke told with a straight face, which is roughly the register of the whole thing. The tourism enthusiasts behind the regatta backed the idea, and the light has been coming on every night since.

She has a wardrobe

Since 2012 the neighbourhood has dressed her. She turns up in an embroidered vyshyvanka, in a hat at New Year, in whatever the season seems to call for; local designers have run up outfits cut specifically to fit a thirty-centimetre figure. Nobody runs this centrally and nobody takes credit for it.

Visitors on their second or third trip to Uzhhorod walk to the bridge early to see what she has on. It is a strange reason to go somewhere and a good one.

Finding her

Svobodka stands at the pedestrian bridge over the Uzh, beside the Consular Steps — named for the consulates along this stretch of embankment, and worth half a minute for the markers giving the distance from Uzhhorod to various world capitals, which sit oddly well beside a monument about leaving and coming back. The Rubik's Cube miniature is a few paces off. She is one of roughly sixty palm-sized bronzes that Mykhailo Kolodko has fixed to the railings, kerbs and steps of this city since 2010, and the one people return to.

Come at dusk. In daylight the torch is a piece of shaped metal; once the LED catches, the smallest working lighthouse in the world goes on shift over the river, and the joke turns out to have been sincere.