PHOTOS: Let’s discover the wonderful world of Kolodko mini statues in Budapest by bike!

Budapest hides a wonderful miniature statue collection, scattered all around the city. Discovering them by bike could be your next awesome programme in the Hungarian capital.

Budapest hides almost 30 miniature statues scattered all around the city, made by Transcarpathian Hungarian-Ukrainian artist Mihály Kolodko.

The sculptures partly commemorate his favourite childhood Hungarian tales, but in addition to the depiction of beloved children’s story characters and famous Hungarian people/inventions, a number of his works have a strong political message.

Discovering all 30 of them can be a bit of a challenge in Budapest. Although there are some organised tours, we decided to take matters into our own hand and came up with a less time-consuming and more fun way by hopping on our bikes.

How long does it take to find the mini statues?

Don’t worry, if you don’t have your own bike: renting a MOL Bubi bike is hassle-free and cheap and can be a good alternative for public transportation in Budapest.

During our quest, we didn’t aim to find all the Kolodko statues, only those in the Budapest downtown area that are easily accessible. Therefore, this article does not include one of Kolodko’s latest works, the Russian warship which was sunk by the Ukrainian forces, nor the “urinal” in the City Park.

Overall, we’ve found 21 Kolodko statues with a similar hub gear bike that can be rented via the MOL Bubi app in 2 hours and 41 minutes, including short breaks hunting down the statues because, well, as the names suggest, they are miniatures, and despite the accurate coordinates in some cases they are hard to spot. We cycled 19.8 kilometres, most of them on bike paths. However, we must note that bicycle infrastructure in Budapest is a bit of a maze compared to other capital cities, and requires some experience to make sense of the intertwining roads and traffic signs.

You can find the exact locations of the statues on Google Maps made by Olyanjó.hu:

The statues:

The statue of Franz Joseph I. on Liberty Bridge.

“Gastro rat”, alias Remy with the Hungarian word “Lecsó” for ratatouille.

The Russians are already in the pantry – a famous catchphrase from the Hungarian movie The Corporal and the Others, a satire about the Second World War and the Russian army.