Mount Ararat that the biblical passage implies that the ark rested upon a "mountain in the district which the Hebrews knew as Ararat, or Armenia", wrote in an 1878 article for the Royal Geographical Society that the biblical writer must have had Mt. Ararat in mind because it is so "very much higher, more conspicuous, and more majestic than any other summit in Armenia." During his visit to Armenia in 2001 Pope John Paul II declared in his homily in Yerevan's St. Gregory the Illuminator Cathedral: "We are close to Mount Ararat, where tradition says that the Ark of Noah came to
Iran–Turkey relations and Smyrna in western Anatolia. Igdir Province in what is Eastern Anatolia formed in fact part of Qajar Iran up to the outcome of the Russo-Persian War (1826-1828) and the ratified Treaty of Turkmenchay. Various empires based in what is now Turkey made inroads into what is now Iran, such as by the Byzantine Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. Iran's second major ethnic group is Azerbaijani which is a Turkic people, there also other Turkic peoples in Iran such as Turkmens and Qashqai people. Turks and Iranians share a common cultural heritage, known as the Turko-Persian tradition, which was a