[Image: Tsovkra-1 via Google Maps].
“Flanked by the Caucasus Mountains on the highest plateau in Dagestan,” Kate Sutton wrote for the February issue of Artforum, “the village of Tsovkra-1 has parlayed the perils of its topography into a peculiar claim to fame: that every able-bodied member of its roughly four-hundred-person population can walk a tightrope. While locals say that this skill was first developed simply as a way to traverse the region’s slopes and crevices, tightrope walking is now considered an integral part of the republic’s cultural heritage.”
It’s like a deleted scene from, or an alternative version of, Italo Calvino’s Baron in the Trees, this village with such a precarious natural and geological setting that everyone becomes an acrobat.
The origins of the town’s peculiar talents are disputed. According to The Week, it might have been all about love: “While no one in Tsovkra-1 knows exactly how the tradition began, the most popular story is that more than 100 years ago, the village’s young men tired of trekking across the valleys that separated them from their female love interests in a neighboring community. So the men strung up a rope between the mountains and, after first pulling themselves across, eventually began to walk the rope, displaying their prowess for their waiting admirers.”
I would love to know the extent to which this has simply been overblown by curious journalists, especially as the only consistent takeaway from coverage of the town is that no one seems to know where the tightrope skills came from—although “all agree that it happened more than 200 years ago” and all seem to agree that Tsovkra-1’s acrobatics are on the verge of disappearing.