By eleven each summer morning the vans are queued three deep below Gergeti Trinity Church, and the ridge that looks so empty in every photograph carries a few hundred people an hour past the same three angles. The pictures are beautiful. The experience is not. But Kazbegi is a district, not a viewpoint — and one valley back, the villages still run on bread ovens and haymaking.

Start in Sno, ten minutes east of Stepantsminda and almost unknown to visitors. It is the village the Gergeti church actually belongs to, with a yard full of carved stone figures and a lane that climbs to the old tower ruins. Stop for coffee with whoever is sitting outside, then walk down to Juta.

Juta sits at the end of a dead-end road under the Chaukhi massif, and the walk from the village up toward the Chaukhi lakes is the best half-day in the district. Go early, take a jacket even in July, and eat at the one guesthouse that has been feeding walkers for twenty years.

Pansheti and Tsdo are two small villages on the old road where the traffic does not go, and between them the valley opens onto Kazbek's south face. There is no ticket, no car park and no queue. There is a spring, a ruined tower, and usually a herd of cattle being moved somewhere.

The quiet Kazbegi has not closed either. It simply never advertised. Drive one valley back from the postcard, and the district is still entirely itself.