Caucasus Sword Dance (Saber Spinning - Shaska Flankirovka)

Info: The land of Caucasus is located between the Pontic - Caspian steppe and Anatolia. Through the history it is inhabited by various nomadic populations such as Sarmatians, Scythians, Turks, Slavs, Mongolians and the native Caucasian populations such as Circassians, Georgians, Chechens, Lezgins and Armenians. Therefore, the culture of Caucasus has been affected by both nomadic and agricultural civilizations. There are historical findings that the various dances with blades were performed by Scythians since B.C.E. 2000s and later the Scythian's culture was combined with Turkic - Hunnic - Ugric cultures. After the collapse of the Mongolian Empire, the nomadic Turkic Kazakhs and Slavic Ukrainian populations have been combined. The new integrated population has been called as the Cossacks (meaning Kazakh in Slavic languages).

The blade dances of this video are some examples of Flankirovka, Khorumi and Perkhuli. Flankirovka is an art of spinning sabers (mostly Shashka) while dancing, originating from Caucasus and today performed by mostly Cossacks. Shashka is a Circassian sword and means "long knife" in Adyghe language. The music of the video is called Sinane Daxe, meaning "my mother" in Adyghe language. The performers in the video are Georgian, Ukrainian, Russian, Circassian, Tatar, Italian and French.

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