DUISI, Georgia — The adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, is rarely heard in Georgia. In this fiercely religious Christian nation, minority religious practice is often suppressed: Last year, citing import laws, local authorities in Georgia’s Samtskhe-Javakheti region dismantled a mosque in the village of Chela. Resisters were beaten or detained. But here in the mountainous Pankisi Gorge, approximately 100 miles by road from the Chechen border, the adhan echoes five times daily; Arabic is taught alongside Georgian and English in village schools; and pigs — common on rural Georgian roads — are notably absent. And unlike in other parts of Georgia’s Kakheti province, where viticulture drives the local economy, no families sell wine here.

The residents of Pankisi have historically been Kists, ethnic Chechens who migrated to the region in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the aftermath of the 1999 Second Chechen War, however, an influx of Chechen refugees — estimates put their number at 7,000 — temporarily doubled the region’s population. Today, between two and three hundred refugee families remain.

The government’s presence is minimal here, but this is less a testament to tolerance than to suspicion. In recent decades, Pankisi has acquired a reputation as a lawless corridor to the North Caucasus for arms smugglers and would-be jihadists, a reputation that has repeatedly prompted American as well as Russian calls for intervention in the region. Though Georgian military action in 2003 reportedly cracked down on militancy in the region, among Georgians, Pankisi still has a reputation as a dangerous place, full of aspiring terrorists.