At Kazbegi a single fourteenth-century church stands alone on a ridge at 2,170 metres, with nothing around it but grass and sky. It is Gergeti Trinity, above the town of Stepantsminda in the Georgian Caucasus, and behind it Mount Kazbek rises to 5,054 metres of glacier and rock. The way up is the pilgrim path through Gergeti village, and the church holds the skyline ahead of you the whole climb, until the ridge at its foot. Jeeps grind up a road as well, mostly around the middle of the day. Kazbek is a dormant volcano wrapped in ice, and long before the church it belonged to Amirani, the Georgian Prometheus, chained there by the gods for giving fire to people.
The mountain gives you the two ends of the day and spends most of the middle in cloud. Before sunrise the first light turns the glacier cone copper-orange while you and the church are still in blue shadow, and for a few minutes the whole peak looks lit from inside. At the other end the lights of Stepantsminda scatter over the valley floor while the summit snow still holds the last daylight. The church sits halfway between the two, a black outline against pink and burnt orange. Kazbek is quiet as a volcano and not as a mountain. The Devdoraki glacier on its flank has broken loose more than once and thundered into the gorge below; one collapse in 2014 dammed the river and cut the road to Russia. Past the church the path keeps going into bare glaciated country towards the ice and the high Juta and Truso valleys, and a short push beyond the ridge leaves you the empty alpine quiet. What makes the view is that the church has nothing beside it, and that was a decision. In Soviet times worship inside the church was forbidden, and it opened only as a state monument. Planners drew up a cable car to carry visitors from the town straight up to the ridge, and the village refused it.