Mount Erciyes is a volcano of 3,917 metres standing alone above the city of Kayseri in central Türkiye, white for much of the year, carrying the largest ski area in the country on its northern slopes, and it is the source of one of the ash sheets that Cappadocia was carved from, seen at the end of the ordinary streets of a city of more than a million people. The volcano is the highest in central Anatolia, a cone with a crown of rock towers at its summit and the bowls of ice-age glaciers cut into its ridges, and the ski area, developed since 2005 with lifts running between 2,088 and 3,346 metres, is twenty minutes from the city, so that breakfast in Kayseri leads to a chairlift before the morning is warm, with snow on the runs from December to March; Erciyes is often handed sole credit for the fairy chimneys, but the tuff of Cappadocia came from several volcanoes, and Erciyes was one of the sources. Strabo wrote that anyone standing on the summit could see the Black Sea to the north and the Mediterranean to the south on a clear day, a claim the geography does not allow, but the view runs across the whole of the plateau.
From July the ridge is the only ice-free window, and the summit becomes a walk-up of six to eight hours from the ski base over volcanic scree that slides back under every step, with some rock scrambling to the crown, instead of a climb on crampons. On clear mornings the summit takes the sun long before the plain does and for a few minutes the snow runs pink and copper while the foothills stay dark, watched from the city's rooftops, and the ice surviving in the Aksu valley is the westernmost glacier in Türkiye, disappearing within a lifetime. The mountain is the emblem of Kayseri. Erciyes is a volcano with a city at its foot, and the ash it threw made the chimneys next door.