Tanzlinde (Peesten)
How do I find it? You can recognise it by the spiral staircase running up into its crown, where an 87 square metre dance floor rests on 18th century sandstone pillars. It stands in Peesten's village centre, next to the church.
A spiral staircase runs up into this tree and comes out in a room. The dance floor built into the crown covers 87 square metres, resting on sandstone pillars raised in the 18th century, and regional accounts call the squared-off, cube-like shape of the whole thing unique in Europe. The village still uses it. Peesten has danced on its lime at the Kirchweih on the second weekend of June for more than 300 years, and there is a small museum in the village explaining how you train a tree into a building. Be clear about what you are looking at, because the structure is older than the trunk holding it. The first Tanzlinde here appears in a municipal record of 1657 and was probably planted between 1550 and 1600; it served the village for three centuries and had to be felled in 1947. A new summer lime went in on the same spot in the early 1950s, the timber hall was rebuilt to the old design in 2001, and the tree you climb into today measures 2.91 metres round and is about eighty years old. It is the tradition that is ancient, carried forward through a young tree, which is how these dance limes have always survived. Free, in the open village centre next to the church.
- Species
- Large-leaved Lime (Tilia platyphyllos)
- Girth
- 2.91 m
- Location
- Village centre, next to the church, Peesten, a district of Kasendorf, Kulmbach district, Bavaria (Peesten, Kulmbach)
- Access
- Free, public. Stands in the open village centre next to the church.
- Getting there
- Peesten, a district of Kasendorf, Kulmbach district, Bavaria (Fraenkische Schweiz region); a car is the practical way in.
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