Pankisi Gorge

Pankisi is the corner of Kakheti where a different language is spoken and a different table is laid. The gorge begins north of Akhmeta and follows the upper Alazani for about thirty kilometres; the main villages are Duisi, Jokolo, Omalo, Birkiani and Tsinubani.

Its people are the Kists, a Chechen-speaking community who crossed the mountains from the north Caucasus between the 1830s and the 1870s and settled here. Their language is a dialect of Chechen, their religion is Islam, and daily life carries traces of both sides of the range: Georgian place names, Chechen surnames, maize and cattle instead of the vineyards of the plain below.

In the 2000s the gorge had a bad reputation — lawlessness first, then years of press attention over radicalisation. Today Pankisi is calm and safe, and local families have built a small tourism economy of their own. Visitors are treated well, though foreigners are still uncommon enough to be noticed.

What people come for:

• The Sufi zikr, a circular sung and moving prayer performed in Duisi by women, one of the very few places in the Caucasus where the practice survives in this form

• Family guesthouses and Kist cooking, generous, meat-heavy and alcohol-free

• Horse and walking routes up into the mountains towards Batsara and the Tusheti border ridges

This is not a sight in the ordinary sense. There is no single monument to photograph. There is a valley, a set of villages, and people who live differently from the wine country twenty minutes down the road — and the interest lies entirely in that.

One practical note on names. The village of Omalo in Pankisi is not the Omalo in Tusheti, and confusing the two has sent more than one traveller to the wrong side of a 2,850 m pass.