Ararat Attractions

Eastern Anatolia (Ararat highland)

The majestic double volcanic cone of Ararat (Late Tertiary) stands isolated on the outer rim of the great sweep of the Taurus Mountains in eastern Anatolia, at the southeastern edge of the Ararat highland. It is a lava sheet plateau out of which rise a number of more recent, equally isolated volcanic massifs.

At 5,137m/16,860ft the main peak, Great Ararat (Büyük Agri Dagi), is the highest mountain in Turkey; it is separated from the 3,896m/12,786ft summit of Little Ararat (Küçük Agri Dagi) by a 2,600m/8,533ft high col.

Because of its great height relative to the surrounding countryside - it rises almost 5,200m/17,000ft above the Igdir basin to the north and 3,500m/11,500ft above the Ararat highland - the visual impact of the mountain is immense. There is some dispute about its name: the Turkish Agri Dagi (Mountain of Pain, a reference to its steepness and roughness), only accurately describes parts of the upper slopes; another school of thought accordingly claims it was known in earlier times as "Egri Dagi" (Lop-sided Mountain). The Armenians called it "Mother of Earth" and the Kurds "Mountain of Evil".

Physical geography

Great and Little Ararat are stratified volcanoes with alternating layers of ash/tuff and trachyte/lava; both have concave truncated cones with central craters. On their flanks are a number of secondary vents as well as hot sulfurous springs and fumaroles. The most recent eruption was on June sixth 1840. The outpouring of lava and subsequent landslide destroyed a nearby monastery on the mountain's east flank and buried the village of Ahira together with 2,000 of its inhabitants. The monastery is said to have had in its possession a piece of wood from Noah's Ark. A huge nevé field and ice cap cover the main summit. The permanent snow line today is at about 4,000m/13,100ft, leaving an area of almost 13sq.km/5sq.mi under perpetual snow and ice.

Importance

Since the 19th century Ararat has been cast in a strategic role as a mountain barrier. In 1828 it was ceded to Russia by the Persians and for almost a century the Turko-Russian frontier ran over the top. Little Ararat marked the point at which Persia, the former Soviet Union (now the Armenian Republic) and Turkey all met. In 1920, as a result of the peace of Gümrü, Ararat passed in its entirety to Turkey. The present Turkish-Armenian frontier follows the line of the Aras Nehri and Arpa Çayi while the old frontier forms the provincial boundary between Agri and Kars.

Ascent

The first person to climb Ararat was Pitton de Tournefort in 1707. The ascent takes three to four days, with at least one further day required for the descent (both ascent and descent take 8 hours from the second overnight camp). The climb can be attempted either from Dogubayazit (southwest) or from Aralik near Igdir (northwest); guides can be hired in Dogubayazit or Igdir. Anyone embarking on the climb will need a special permit from the Interior Ministry in Ankara.

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Ararat is chiefly famous as the place where, according to the Old Testament (I. Moses 8:4), Noah's Ark finally came to rest, a claim based on a highly questionable interpretation of the biblical text. To the Hebrews Ararat was the land north of the Assur Empire, so the biblical reference was probably to the Armenian area as a whole i.e. to the Assyrian Arardi/Uruartru (13th century B.C.) or Accadian Urartu (from about 900 B.C.). Because the name had survived only as the name of the mountain, the interpreters of the bible were almost certainly misled. The legend of Noah and the Great Flood can itself be traced back to Sumerian sources dating from the third millennium B.C.. In these a King Ziusudra of Shuruppak survives the Great Flood in an ark which, according to the Gilgamesh Epic (late second millennium B.C.), came to rest on a mountain called Nisir (in Iranian Kurdistan). Armenians believe its resting place was Süphan Dagi, the extinct volcano near Lake Van, while for Muslims it was Cudi Dagi, in Mardin Province, near Cizre. Here, in 1953, fragments of timber thought to be 6500 years old were discovered in alluvial sand.

Although scholarly research has shown the Old Testament stories and the Gilgamesh Epic to be set much further south, over the last 140 years there have been several reported "sightings" of the Ark on Ararat. In 1833 a Turkish expedition reiterated, though without any new evidence, an old shepherds' tale of a wooden ship's prow protruding from the south glacier in summer. In 1892 the then Archdeacon of Jerusalem and Babylon put forward the thesis that the wrecked vessel does indeed lie hidden beneath the ice. In the First World War a Soviet air force officer called Roskovitzki claimed to have seen remains of a large shipwreck on the southern flank (photographs reportedly taken by a Soviet expedition are said to have been lost in the October Revolution). During the Second World War a Soviet and four American pilots reported similar sightings. In 1951 an American historian named Smith spent twelve days combing the mountain but found nothing. The Frenchman Navarra claims to have found remains of very old beams in a glaciated area. Since 1985 those searching for the Ark have concentrated their efforts on the col between Great and Little Ararat.

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