Iğdır in the Eastern Anatolia Region of Turkey. Turkey's highest mountain, Ağrı Dağı, (the Biblical Mount Ararat) is in Iğdır province, but much of the land is a wide plain far below the mountain. The area's name came from "Iğdır Bey", the oldest son of Cengiz Alp who was one of six sons of Oghuz Han belonging to internalOghuz three arrows branch considered to be the 21st of the 24 Oghuz branches. They spread throughout Anatolia and there are towns and villages named Iğdır in Malatya and other parts of Turkey today.

Historians believe that Iğdır went by the Armenian name of Tsolakert during the Middle Ages. When the Spanish traveler Ruy González de Clavijo passed through the region in the early 1400s, he noted that there was a fortress at Igdir ruled by a woman, the widow of a brigand whom Timurlane had put to death. In 1555, the town became a part of Safavid Empire and remained under Iranian rule (with brief military occupations by the Ottomans between 1578–1605, 1635–36 and 1722–46) until it fell into the hands of the Russians after the Russo-Persian War of 1826-1828.