Mt. Ararat
Biblical Mount Ararat (Armenian Արարատ) looms over the central parts of Armenia, and Yerevan, just outside of the nations borders, and holds similar significance for Armenians that Mt. Fuji holds for the Japanese. Armenians often call it Masis (Մասիս) as well.
The higher mountain, 5,137 metres (16,854 ft) elevation is a snow-capped dormant volcanic cone, located in the far east of Turkey, 16 km west of Iran and 32 km south of Armenia. The Book of Genesis identifies this mountain range as the resting place of Noah's Ark after the Great Flood described there.
The smaller (3896 m) cone, Little Mount Ararat, (usually called poker masis in Armenia) rises just southeast of the bigger peak. The lava plateau stretches out between the two pinnacles. Ararat is a stratovolcano, formed of lava flows and pyroclastic ejecta.
The last activity on the mountain was a major earthquake in July 1840 centered around the Ahora Gorge, a northeast trending chasm that drops 1825 metres (6,000 ft) from the top of the mountain.
Often obscured by a haze, brief visitors to Yerevan may never see it. Czar Nicholas II waited a week to see it without luck, and left saying, "Too bad for Ararat. It will not have seen the Czar."
The Ararat anomaly is an object appearing on photographs of the snowfields at the summit of Mount Ararat,and advanced by some believers in Biblical literalism as the remains of Noah's Ark. The anomaly is located on the northwest corner of the Western Plateau of Mount Ararat at (approximately 39°42′10″N, 44°16′30″E) at about 15,500 feet (4,724 meters), some 2.2 kilometers west of the 16,854 feet (5,137 metres) summit, on the edge of what appears from the photographs to be a steep downward slope.
Map
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