Mount Erciyes was the emblem of a Roman city: Caesarea, today's Kayseri, stamped the mountain on its coins for three centuries, and on some of them it is drawn smoking. Those coins were recording something real. Erciyes is a stratovolcano, now dormant, and its summit reaches 3,917 metres, close to 2,900 metres above the plain the city sits on. It was still erupting long after people had settled Anatolia, and its youngest lava domes were built roughly nine thousand years ago. Its most violent eruption came much earlier and buried the region under a thick sheet of ash. That ash hardened into rock, and it is one of the layers from which the fairy chimneys of Cappadocia, 55 kilometres to the west, were later carved. Ice did the rest of the shaping. The bowl-shaped hollows and moraines gouged out during the last glaciation are still easy to see on the slopes, and a remnant of that ice survives in the Aksu valley on the north-west face.
In winter the mountain carries the largest ski area in Turkey. The lift base stands about 25 kilometres by road from downtown Kayseri and rises from 2,088 to 3,346 metres over some 55 kilometres of runs, open from early December to late April. Ride a lift up and the city lies flat across the plain beneath you while the white cone climbs alone overhead, with nothing in sight coming near its height. When the snow retreats those same slopes turn into a long walk-up instead: six to eight hours of ridge and loose volcanic scree, ending in a short scramble through the ragged rock towers of the summit crown. The volcano is quiet, but it is classed as dormant rather than extinct. The glacier is the part that is visibly going, retreating fast enough that it is expected to vanish within decades.