The “Monument to Ostap Bender” is a statue dedicated to the fictional character Ostap Bender, created by Soviet authors Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov. Ostap Bender is a con man and anti-hero who first appeared in the novel “The Twelve Chairs”.

The statue is located in Elista, the capital of the Republic of Kalmykia, in Southern Russia (TripAdvisor). More specifically, the monument can be found on the pedestrian boulevard Efremova, amongst many souvenir stalls, quite near the Beer museum.

The statue portrays Ostap Bender like Sergei Yurskiy, the actor who played “the great schemer” in the 1968 film “The Golden Calf”.