This sculpture by Gábor Miklós Szőke, a prominent Hungarian sculptor, is a token of friendship between the Russian and Hungarian peoples. Deer is a special animal for Nizhny Novgorod. The city’s coat of arms features a deer. One of accounts has it that the coat of arms originally sported an elk, but, in her quest to bring the Russian heraldry closer to Europe, Catherine the Great ordered for the authentic local elk to be replaced with a more traditional red deer.

According to another story, a deer (or was it an elk, after all?) once bolted out of the woods, thus warning the people of Nizhny Novgorod about an approaching enemy army, which allowed the city to be prepared for an attack. Images of deer are everywhere in Nizhny — on street lights, flowerbeds, house walls, sides of buses.

The Nizhny Novgorod deer is also part of the mascot of the Gorky Automobile Plant (known as GAZ), one of the city’s largest enterprises.