On the morning of December 29, 2025, I saw the following New York Post headline in my Miniflux feed reader entries: NYC snow pile carved into ‘crazy’ Snow King sculpture – now it’s a tourist attraction. I knew with near absolute certainty what the headline referred to before opening it. I happened to be walking down Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue on the late afternoon (~4:30) of December 28, 2025, when I saw people gathered in a semi-circle around a mound of snow. It was only when I was close that I saw the cause of the hubbub, which appeared to me as pictured in the New York Post.
Readers may be confused as to why I had to rely on a New York Post photo instead of my own, perhaps recalling that I have documented snowmen from the 2020 Winter Storm Gail, with frog hats, and with masks (not to mention a number of hard plastic and inflatable snowmen). I generally explained the reasoning in a post on The Emu Café Social: The lighting was not good for my current phone camera, there were too many people gathered around “Snow King” to get a clean shot, and I wanted to get home. But something did not sit right with me after I posted to The Emu Café Social. How could I not have my own coverage of a snow sculpture in my general area that was important enough for the New York Post to write about, especially after I had happened upon it before the Post story ran? No good.
I decided to re-visit the Snow King’s court on the afternoon of December 29, 2025, reaching it a bit before 4 PM. On this day there was no one gathered around the Snow King and a family walked by it without glancing. The reason should be obvious from my photo:
It had rained a bit and the temperature reached the mid-40s on the 29th. While that may have been a welcome relief to many New Yorkers, it was less desirable for the Snow King. What had been 24 hours earlier a striking piece of art was now severely weathered. The face was still there, but not the same. Still though, I like the weathered Snow King too. It reminded me of a statue from antiquity that had stood athwart the elements for centuries, coming down to posterity just a bit worse for wear. Of course, stone is more long-lasting than snow.
According to the New York Post, the artist is Mr. Henrik Lojka, who spent approximately three hours crafting the snow sculpture which he said represented King Mindaugas, the 13th century ruler of Lithuania. The Post interviewed Mr. Lojka about the sculpture. Mr. Lojka said that he came to the United States from Belarus in 2021 after having been briefly imprisoned for expressing his opposition to the government of Belarusian President Alexandr Lukashenko. His motivation for making the sculpture and two other nearby busts was, in his words, to remind people of Belarus’s unique history and culture, which he believes is being lost due to the Belarusian government’s close relationship with Russia (see fact 20 on my list of 54 Things I Learned in 2024 for context about the use of Russian vs Belarusian in Belarus under Mr. Lukashenko).
When I first walked by the Snow King, I did not take note of my immediate surroundings. But after reading the Post article it dawned on me that it was just up the block from the Belarusian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, also on Atlantic Avenue. See my photograph below, also from the 29th:
I had not finished the New York Post article before documenting the weathered King Mindaugas, but learning that the artist was depicting a historical 13th century monarch was in line with my immediate thought that the weathered snow sculpture reminded me of weathered stone sculptures.
