Mount Ararat, Ağrı Dağı in Turkish, is a dormant volcano on the far eastern border of Türkiye and, at 5,137 metres, the highest point in the country. Iran lies sixteen kilometres to its east and Armenia thirty-two kilometres to its north. The massif has two tops: Büyük Ağrı, the great cone, also named the Atatürk peak, and Küçük Ağrı, the smaller İnönü peak, a little under 3,900 metres. Snow never leaves the summit, and the ice there is the largest glacier anywhere in Türkiye. Since 2004 the mountain has been a national park, and the town of Doğubayazıt at its foot gathers the other sights of the area: an Ottoman palace, an Urartian castle, a meteor crater and the ship-shaped formation known as Noah's Ark.
One mountain, many names
No name of the mountain is a translation of another. The Turkish name, Ağrı Dağı, goes back to the late Middle Ages. In Persian it is Kūh-e Nūḥ, Noah's mountain, and in Kurdish Çiyayê Agirî, the mountain of fire. Ararat, the name the rest of the world knows, began as the Greek rendering of a Hebrew word that ancient writers used for the Urartians of the Armenian highlands, and no people native to the region ever gave it to the mountain. The traditional Armenian name is Masis, and in Armenia today it is heard about as often as Ararat. The tie to Noah's Ark is what has given the massif its place in sacred texts.
Lava, snow and the only ice cap in Türkiye
The cone is basalt up to about 4,000 metres, with andesite lava above. No other mountain in the country still carries an ice cap; this one covers ten square kilometres. Permanent snow starts at 4,300 metres, though Blumenthal reckoned in 1958 that during the Pleistocene it reached as low as 3,000. Eleven tongues of ice, one to two and a half kilometres long, hang from the summit, ending around 4,200 metres on the south side and 3,900 on the north. The biggest lies north-east of the crater in Cehennemdere, a valley where the slope is so sheer that falling ice has piled up again near 2,370 metres as a dead glacier buried in debris.
Moraines are scarce at its foot: Turkish Wikipedia puts this down to the lack of developed valleys besides Cehennemdere, the lack of steep rock summits to drop debris onto the ice, and the volcano's own output burying older deposits.
Walking and climbing routes
Around the main cone stand several peaks over 3,000 metres, their flanks scattered with basalt blocks and old lava flows, and between them are small lakes with plenty of birds and uncommon wild flowers. Four of the country's highest summits are in Ağrı province: Greater Ararat at 5,137 metres, Mount Süphan at 4,058 metres, whose top is in Bitlis though its north-eastern slopes are in Ağrı, Lesser Ararat, and Mount Tendürek at 3,533 metres.
The routes climb Süphan, Köse and both Ararat summits, Greater and Lesser, and the high lakes of Balık and Küp. GPS tracks for them have been published, together with a guidebook that describes each in detail. Balık Gölü, on the Aras mountains, is one of the highest lakes in the country: a volcanic barrier lake of thirty square kilometres at 2,241 metres, thirty-seven metres deep at most.
The meteor crater and Noah's Ark
Inside the national park, 35 kilometres east of Doğubayazıt, a cylindrical pit about 60 metres deep and 35 wide drops through fissured basalt lying over Tertiary limestone. The provincial directorate calls it the world's second largest meteor crater, after the one in Alaska, and local people hold that a big meteorite fell here in 1892.
On the slopes between Telçeker and Üzengili, some 3.5 kilometres off the Türkiye-İran transit road, a mass of earth has the shape of a ship; locally the spot is called Cudi Dağı. A survey corps officer, Captain İhsan Durupınar, spotted it on 11 September 1959 on aerial photogrammetric maps. From 1983 searches grew, with American researchers including James Irwin, and geologists from the MTA Institute, Atatürk University and Yüzüncü Yıl University examined it. The Doğubayazıt district governorship itself describes the question as open: a landslide shape, or the resting place of the Flood's ship. It has been protected since 17 September 1987 as a natural site and open-air museum, and a café looks down on it.
İshak Paşa Palace and the castle above Doğubayazıt
İshak Paşa Palace, on the UNESCO Tentative List since 2000, is a whole complex rather than one building: mosque, tomb, library, cellars, dormitories, harem and selamlık, set around two courtyards behind great portals. Çolak Abdi Paşa, of the Çıldır Atabeg line, started the work in 1685, and it ended in 1784 under Küçük İshak Paşa, ninety-nine years carried out by masters from Akhaltsikhe. Seljuk forms mix with baroque, gothic, rococo and empire touches and with the craft traditions of Iran, Georgia and the Caucasus; about 110 different motifs appear on the portals. The east gate, the only way in from outside, is 10.6 metres wide and 11.8 high, and its heart, palmette, lotus and eye motifs are read as a charm against the evil eye.
Nearby, on sheer rock at Belleburç, Doğubayazıt Castle is one of the most important Urartian remains in eastern Anatolia, with rock-cut tombs, a temple and cisterns cut into the stone, and Mount Ararat in view from its walls. The Eski Beyazıt Mosque beside it, from the reign of Selim I, is among the earliest Ottoman mosques in the east. About eight kilometres from town, close to the palace, is the tomb of Ahmed-i Hanı, the poet and scholar born in 1651 who died in 1707 and is remembered for the mesnevi Mem u Zin.
