Korzo Street

In 1936 the Uzhhorod police counted the traffic on Korzo: some 800 cars, 1,800 carts and 3,000 bicycles in an average day. Two years later the city tried to solve the resulting chaos by forbidding pedestrians to stop and stand about. It didn't work. Korzo is now closed to traffic altogether, and standing about is more or less the point of it.

The street cuts through the old town — cobbled, narrow, a few minutes end to end. Uzhhorod has come here for a century not to get anywhere but to be seen not getting anywhere. Cafés open and close; the flow of people doesn't.

A street that outlived all its names

Corso is Italian for a street you walk for the sake of walking. The romantic account credits the Drugeths, a Neapolitan family who held Uzhhorod and its castle from the 1320s to the 1680s. The city's own tourist office prefers a duller route: the word came from Budapest at the start of the 20th century.

Officialdom took its time. The street has been Mostova and Velykomostova, after the bridge it leads to; Rašín, for Czechoslovakia's first finance minister; Kazinczy, for the Hungarian writer and language reformer; Suvorov under the Soviets. Korzo became the legal name only after Ukrainian independence — nobody had called it anything else anyway.

What made the promenade stick was infrastructure. By 1908 the street had asphalt and electric lamps, and a newspaper that year noted the buildings were nothing much but the evening walking was pleasant. Custom prescribed two turns a day, at noon and after six. Only the evening one took.

Reading the facades

The street's face was set at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and it is pointedly not one face: Austro-Hungarian houses heavy with stucco and wrought iron, the flatter blocks of the Czechoslovak years between 1920 and 1939, a few Soviet insertions. Walk it slowly, head up — a majolica frieze here, a wavy Secession window surround there.

The crossing with vul. Voloshyna is known to everyone as the Cross: the unofficial centre, and the default place to meet. On it stands the White Ship, a former inn built in 1902–03, gutted by fire in 1909 and rebuilt — flats and shops behind the windows now, but the name never came off. Outside no. 22 sits the Globe of Uzhhorod, a forged sphere set there in 2012 with the city's old streets worked into its surface in miniature.

Coffee, and how to drink it here

Uzhhorod claims to be the coffee capital of Ukraine. Lviv disputes this, loudly. What it has is the Austro-Hungarian version of the habit: coffee came in under the empire, and by the 19th century the city had proper cafés while poorer households still brewed a surrogate from roasted barley. The famous addresses of the early 1900s — the Millennium, the Bercheni, the confectionery of the Czech pâtissier Bohumil Purmo — set a standard the street has traded on ever since.

Order without hurrying, ideally standing at a high table near a window. Khod' na kavi — come for a coffee — still opens business meetings and first dates here. Sitting down is permitted. It is simply less local.

The bronze hunt

The first of Uzhhorod's palm-sized bronzes appeared in December 2010 — the idea belonged to the local professor Fedir Shandor, the hands to the sculptor Mykhailo Kolodko — and the city has been accumulating them ever since. Around seventy-five now, and any figure you read is out of date. They perch on parapets, railings and window ledges along Korzo and the riverbank, each commemorating someone or something with a claim on Transcarpathia. The only technique that works is to stop looking straight ahead.

Around the corner

Korzo is a corridor more than a destination. One end opens onto Theatre Square — officially Yevhen Fentsyk Square, after the Transcarpathian writer and priest. The square is young by local standards: flood-prone waste ground until the mid-19th century, and the Hotel Korona on its edge gave the city its first film screenings in 1911.

Behind the theatre stands the former Hasidic synagogue of 1904, Moorish-Byzantine and thoroughly theatrical, which has housed the Transcarpathian Regional Philharmonic since 1947. A footbridge crosses the Uzh to Petőfi Square — New Town, then Kossuth, Masaryk, Stalin and Reunification before it settled in 1990 on the Hungarian poet. Then the Independence Embankment, whose linden alley was planted in 1928 by Czech botanists to mark ten years of Czechoslovakia: some 2.2km, around 300 trees, routinely called the longest in Europe. In June you smell it before you reach it.

When to come

Late afternoon into evening is the street's own hour, when the lamps come on and the promenade instinct reasserts itself. Spring belongs to the blossom: Uzhhorod's sakura open in the second half of April and hold about a fortnight, with a festival built around them. Winter brings the Christmas market.

Give the old town half a day, not twenty minutes: Korzo, Theatre Square, the footbridge, Petőfi Square, the embankment, back along the other bank. Wear a shoe with a sole; the cobbles are handsome and uneven. Don't over-schedule it — the slowness is what people have been coming here for since long before anyone counted the cars.