Doğubayazıt City Tour — İshak Pasha Palace & Mount Ararat

Doğubayazıt City Tour — İshak Pasha Palace Beneath Mount Ararat

Discover the dramatic far east of Turkey on this full-day Doğubayazıt city tour, a private day out beneath the snow-capped cone of Mount Ararat that takes in the fairy-tale İshak Pasha Palace, a giant meteor crater and the historic heart of this frontier town. With a professional guide you explore one of Anatolia's most spectacular settings, where Ottoman, Persian and Seljuk worlds meet.

Highlights of the Doğubayazıt Day Tour

• İshak Pasha Palace — an 18th-century palace blending Ottoman, Persian and Seljuk design, perched above the plain.
• Mount Ararat views — the legendary 5,137-metre peak towering over the landscape.
• Meteor Crater — one of the largest meteorite craters in the world, near the Iranian border.
• Beyazıt Old Mosque & Ahmed-i Hani Tomb — historic landmarks of this spiritual frontier town.
• Doğubayazıt Castle — an ancient fortress with sweeping views over the valley.

Collected from your hotel in the morning, you set out to explore Doğubayazıt, the easternmost town of Turkey in the province of Ağrı, set in a landscape of high plains and volcanic peaks. The highlight is the magnificent İshak Pasha Palace, an eighteenth-century masterpiece often compared to Topkapı, whose domes, gateways and carved stonework rise against the backdrop of Mount Ararat, where legend places Noah's Ark.

The tour also visits the Beyazıt Old Mosque, admired for its unusual architecture, and the Meteor Crater, one of the largest in the world, formed when a meteorite struck near the Iranian frontier. You pay your respects at the tomb of Ahmed-i Hani, the revered seventeenth-century Islamic scholar and poet, and end at Doğubayazıt Castle, an ancient fortress with commanding views, before returning to your hotel after a day in one of the most striking corners of Turkey.