Mount Ararat is an ice-capped volcano rising three kilometres straight off flat farmland in Ağrı province, in the far east of Türkiye near the borders of Armenia and Iran, to 5,137 metres, the highest mountain in the country, the mountain on which the ark of Noah is said to have come to rest, and it is climbed in a walk-up of four or five days with a guide and a permit in summer and seen from the plain in all seasons, two cones side by side. The mountain stands alone, with Little Ararat beside it at 3,896 metres, and no one is known to have reached the top until 1829, when a German professor climbed it and was condemned by the Armenian church, which held that the ark still lay up there and that no one had any business looking; the climb goes up from Doğubayazıt through the summer camps of Kurdish herding families, who move up the flanks with their flocks wherever there is running water below the snowline, to a camp at 4,200 metres among lava blocks with the plains turning gold three kilometres below, and a night start across the ice cap to the summit. Ararat lies entirely inside Türkiye yet has sat at the centre of Armenia's coat of arms since 1918 and fills the western skyline of Yerevan, 65 kilometres away.
Below the mountain, on a rock terrace above Doğubayazıt, stands the Ishak Pasha Palace, completed in 1784 in a mix of Seljuk, Ottoman and Persian stonework, with carved portals and honey-coloured courtyards. Some thirty kilometres from the summit, on the slopes of a different volcano, a mound of hardened mud at Durupınar sits in the outline of a hull about 150 metres long, which the geologists explain as a fold of rock. In winter the snow pushes far down the cone and the double summit stands white above the plain. Ararat is a volcano with a boat in its story, and the climb is the answer most people settle for.