During a Sunday lunch hour, commuters on Seoul’s main boulevard turned their attention to a narrow ribbon of slackline stretched between the Koreana hotel and the Dong‑A Media Center, a few hundred metres from Gyeongbokgung Palace and Gwanghwamun square. A countdown on a large screen marked 1 pm, and the 34‑year‑old Estonian athlete Jaan Roose stepped off the Koreana roof onto the 120‑metre‑high line. Organisers called the event South Korea’s first high‑altitude slackline performance.
Roose has earned a reputation for performing slackline feats in dramatic urban settings. He is a three‑time world champion and previously completed a 185‑metre highline between Qatar’s Katara towers. In 2024 he was the first person to slackline the 3.6‑km Strait of Messina, falling near the end but being caught by his safety harness. He also traversed 14.7 km over 12 hours on a line above the Danube in Bratislava.
At the halfway point, Roose paused, sat cross‑legged, then lay flat on his back, drawing gasps from the crowd below. He then rose and continued, dropping down again at the centre of the line, waving to the onlookers. When he reached the Dong‑A Media Center, he turned and began the return to the Koreana roof. The traffic below kept moving as the crowd held its breath each time he wobbled, with some office workers and visitors expressing both awe and fear.
Roose had planned a second performance at 4 pm, and nearby Cheonggye Plaza hosted lower‑height slacklines for the public. He said a 2022 visit to South Korea had inspired his Gwanghwamun walk, where he encountered jultagi, Korea’s traditional tightrope walking that UNESCO added to its intangible cultural heritage list in 2011. Unlike other tightrope traditions, jultagi blends comedy with acrobatics, featuring singers, jokes and dancers on the rope while ground clowns interact with musicians.
