Mount Erciyes is a volcano of 3,917 metres standing alone above Kayseri, in central Türkiye. The striking thing is where you see it from: the end of ordinary streets in a city of more than a million people. Nothing else comes near it. It is also the reason the country's best-known landscape looks the way it does. About 2.8 million years ago Erciyes threw out some fifty cubic kilometres of ash, and that layer is one of the sheets the fairy chimneys fifty-five kilometres west are carved from.
Its northern flank carries the largest ski area in Türkiye, with lifts from a base at 2,088 metres to 3,346. It is close enough to town that breakfast in Kayseri and a chairlift before the morning is warm belong to the same outing. Above the treeline the runs open out wide and bare, the summit crown hanging over all of them. From July the ridge is finally free of ice and the top becomes a walk rather than a climb. It takes six to eight hours from the ski base, most of it on volcanic scree that slides back under every step. It finishes with a short scramble through the rock towers of the crown. Strabo wrote that from up there you could see the Black Sea and the Mediterranean at once; the geography does not allow it. What survives of the ice in the Aksu valley is the last glacier in this part of the country, measured at 700 metres long in 1905 and 260 by 2009. 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. When the air is stable a lens-shaped cloud parks itself on the peak and takes the same colour, floating there like smoke. But the shape you came for is not up there. On the mountain Erciyes is loose rock and sky, and the cone only puts itself back together once you are down on the flat again.