Tanzlinde (Limmersdorf)

Every year since 1792, with barely a gap, this village has danced four metres up inside a tree. The Lindenkirchweih of Limmersdorf takes place on St Bartholomew's Day, 24 August, on a floor built into the crown of this lime, and in 2014 the German UNESCO Commission entered the custom in the national register of Intangible Cultural Heritage, one of 27 entries that year. It is the dance on this specific tree that carries the recognition, not the tree on its own, which is a rarer thing than a protection order. The lime was planted in 1686, a date from the record rather than an estimate, so it was already a century old when the record of the dance begins in 1792, and it has been trained for the job ever since: girth 4.36 metres, height 19 metres, in vital condition at the last survey in 2022. Limmersdorf keeps a small Tanzlinden museum to explain the rest. Two hundred and thirty-odd years of Franconian villagers climbing into the same crown, through the Napoleonic wars and two world wars, and the tree is still doing the one job it was shaped for. It stands in the open village centre near the church, free.