Russian village's tightrope walking prowess

By James Kilner

TSOVKRA-1, Russia (Reuters) - By a quirk of history that goes so far back in time no one really remembers it, nearly every man, woman and child in the remote mountain village of Tsovkra-1 can walk the tightrope.

For children in the village on Russia's southern fringe, after-school games means balancing on a wire suspended one storey above the ground.

"I'm not afraid," 12-year-old Magomed Gadzhiyev said as he stood in a scruffy field on the edge of the village. "My mother was a tightrope walker and I will be too."

Behind him an 8-year-old girl wearing a pale green costume gingerly walked across a tightrope about the height of a single-storey building and the length of a goods truck. She held a 3-metre long pole by her waist to help her balance but there were no cushions or mattresses to break a fall.

In its glory years after World War Two, Tsovkra-1 provided tightrope walkers for the Soviet Union's circuses. They entertained crowds across the world with daredevil acrobatics and won the Soviet Union's highest award for artists.

That period ended about 30 years ago, but the tradition never died out and now the village is trying to revive its reputation as a world tightrope walking centre.

Tsovkra-1 -- so called because there is a second Tsovkra nearby -- is a farming village in Dagestan, a republic jammed between Chechnya to the west and the Caspian Sea to the east in Russia's turbulent north Caucasus region.

From Makhachkala, the dirty, sprawling Dagestani capital, Tsovkra is a four-hour drive along asphalt roads and then dirt tracks, over jagged mountains and through steep-sided valleys where villages retain independent languages and culture.