Pankisi Valley is one of the more beautiful spots in Georgia, but for a long time the stigma of terrorism meant few tourists ventured there.
azy Dakishvili began studying law in 2008 at the Georgian American University in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital city. When her fellow students found out she was from Pankisi Valley, in the northeast of the country, they were stunned.
Pankisi is only a 125-km drive from Tbilisi, but for those students the stunning rural valley may as well have been Baghdad. Their information about the area, near Georgia’s border with Chechnya, was likely gleaned from media reports about Pankisi supposedly being a terrorism hotspot. Having endured prejudiced comments at university about her background, Dakishvili met with similar reactions when she became a lawyer after graduating in 2011. Pankisi is home to around 10,000 Kist people: predominantly Muslim ethnic Chechens living in Georgia, which is an overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian country.
Leaving her legal career, Dakishvili returned to Pankisi and drew up a new mission: creating a grassroots, agriculture-focused tourism scene to replace terrorism associations with those of Kist hospitality. She told friends and family that she planned to open a guesthouse in Jokolo, her home village, but they dismissed the idea of tourists visiting Pankisi. The memory of the 1999-2004 ‘Pankisi crisis’ was still strong.in 2013, the foreign extremists were long gone.
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