The city and province are named after a western Turkish clan called Iğdir that belonged to a branch of the Oghuz Turks. They spread throughout Anatolia and there are several towns and villages named Iğdir in Eskisehir Province and other parts of Turkey today. The city in Armenian is called Iğdir, and also Tsolakert, after an ancient settlement nearby.

Igdir went by the Armenian name of Tsolakert during the Middle Ages. When the Spanish traveler Ruy González de Clavijo passed through this region in the early 15th century, he stayed a night in a castle he called Egida, located at the foot of Mount Ararat. Clavijo describes it as being built upon a rock and ruled by a woman, the widow of a brigand that Timurlane had put to death. Because modern Iğdir has no such rock, and is a considerable distance from the Ararat foothills, it is believed that medieval Iğdir was located at a different site, at a place also known as Tsolakert, now called Tasburun. Russian excavations there at the end of the 19th century discovered the ruins of houses and what was identified as a church, as well as traces of fortifications. The settlement may have been abandoned after an earthquake in 1664.[ In 1555 the town became a part of the Safavid Empire, remaining under Persian rule (with brief military occupations by the Ottomans in 1514, between 1534-35, 1548-49, 1554-55, 1578-1605, 1635-36 and 1722-46) until it fell into the hands of the Russian Empire after the Russo-Persian War of 1826-1828.