Do you have eagle eyes? Do you love finding small things which are hidden in plain sight? Neither did I until I started and now, I’m hooked.
Mihály Kolodko is a guerilla-sculptor who started by placing a few tiny bronze statues himself around the City of Budapest. Since then, he has been commissioned to do several other works, including the first statue I’d like to tell you about.
The Diver and the Key
This was the first Kolodko statue I tracked down and is one of the easier ones to find. It is also clever, witty and beautiful. Find the New York Café, and you’re halfway there.
Legend has it that when the incredibly grandiose New York Café first opened in 1894, it was an enormous success, and on opening night, the Hungarian author Molnar Ferenc and friends, were having such a fabulous time, that he and his friends were so outraged at closing time, they stole the front door key and threw it into the Danube, so that it would never be able to close again. The statue is on a stone bollard near the junction of Dohány utca and Osvát utca.
The Moon Buggy
This was one of the trickier statues to find. There are no clues apart from where it was placed…on Hold (Moon in Hungarian) utca.
Why is it in Budapest? It is here because after the 1956 revolution in Hungary, the engineer Ferenc Pavlics escaped to the US and started working for NASA. It was Pavlics who came up with the lightweight but tough wheels for the Lunar Rover vehicle which was first driven on the moon on the 1971 Apollo 15 mission. So, it is now captured in bronze, forever, on its own moon-shaped bollard in Budapest.
The Rubik’s cube
From the photos it is clear and obvious that this statue is on the banks of the Danube on the opposite side to the Houses of Parliament building. But where exactly? And why?
The Rubik’s cube puzzle was invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik, and so Kolodko has commemorated his famous invention with this bronze, unsolvable cube, on the banks of the Danube near Batthyány Square.
