▲ This photo, provided by the KOCIS, shows people at the Giji-si Tug-of-War Festival. (PHOTO NOT FOR SALE) (Yonhap)

 

 

SEOUL, Apr. 21 (Yonhap) -- The Korean Culture and Information Service (KOCIS), an affiliated organization of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of the South Korean government, is gearing up to carry out eight UNESCO cultural heritage tours for about 270 foreigners living in South Korea from April to November.

This year marks the organization's 10th anniversary of the UNESCO Cultural Heritage Tour Project and the 20th anniversary of the Convention on the Protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Last year, South Korea was acknowledged as the country with the second-most intangible cultural heritage inscribed by UNESCO.

In order to commemorate such an honorable title, the KOCIS has been organizing events for hands-on human intangible cultural heritage experiences, including tug-of-war, tightrope walking, pansori, Taekkyeon, haenyeo, mask dance, ssireum -- Korean wrestling --, and kimchi.

For the very first event of this year, participants will be able to play tug-of-war, which gained worldwide recognition by being featured in the Netflix sensation “Squid Game.” More than 35 overseas influencers who create short-form videos in Korea, including Filipino actor Christian Lagahit who starred as “No. 276” in the Netflix series, will be visiting the 500-year-old Giji-si Tug-of-War Festival at the city of Dangjin, from Saturday to Sunday.

During the event, participants will also visit the site of producing a 200-meter-long rope with 30,000 layers of rice straw.

On the second day, they will be able to watch two ropes, weighing over 40 tons, being tied into one gigantic rope, with which they will be playing tug-of-war. Throughout the event, participants will also be carrying out various missions, such as solving quizzes related to traditional Korean tug-of-war and producing short videos on the tug-of-war. Every hands-on experience and tour will be filmed and produced into videos that will be available for international viewing on KoreaNet’s official YouTube channel.

In addition, the KOCIS will be running programs including the Suwon tightrope walking event for the U.S. troops in Korea in May, followed by the Takkeyon event for overseas officials at the National Defense University in the city of Chungju in July. Then, in August, overseas influencers and journalists will be invited to the Jeju Island to swim in the oceans as haenyeos, or female divers who make a living by harvesting seafood.

“Starting this year, we are looking forward to increasing the number of participants and hands-on events as well as online content,” said Kim Jang-ho, head of the KOCIS. “We hope that foreigners living in and out of Korea can enjoy this unrivaled opportunity to get to know the fun and value of visiting global Korean cultural heritages.”

(This article is translated from Korean to English by Ha eun Lee)

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