Tamanian and Kojoyan, 1918
Alexander Tamanian was the Yerevan-born, St Petersburg-trained architect who would, in the 1920s, draft the master plan of Yerevan as it stands today, including Republic Square. Hakob Kojoyan was a Soviet-Armenian painter trained in the late Russian Empire and active in the early Soviet republics. In 1918, working for the short-lived First Republic of Armenia, they together produced the design of the new state coat of arms. The First Republic lasted from May 1918 to December 1920 before being absorbed into the Soviet Union. Their emblem disappeared from official use for the next 71 years.
On 19 April 1992, the newly independent Republic of Armenia restored their design by act of the Supreme Council, with one substantive modification: the addition of Noah's Ark resting on the summit of Mount Ararat. The 1918 original showed Mount Ararat and Little Ararat, but no Ark. The 1992 revival, codified again by parliamentary law on 15 June 2006, is the version on every Armenian state document today.
The Central Inescutcheon -- Mount Ararat with Noah's Ark
The central shield (the inescutcheon, in heraldic terminology) shows Mount Ararat in silver, with Noah's Ark at the summit and receding flood waters around the base of the mountain. The biblical reference is to Genesis 8:4: "And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat." The Armenian Apostolic Church, the first state church in history (established 301 AD under King Tiridates III), has read this passage for seventeen centuries as a direct theological link between the founding of Christian civilisation and the Armenian highlands.
Mount Ararat lies inside the borders of the Republic of Türkiye since 1921. Mount Aragats, which has been substituted into the Republic Square parade tribune for 28 May 2026, lies entirely inside the borders of the Republic of Armenia. The political grammar of the substitution is therefore not just about symbol replacement -- it is about substituting a peak the present state does not control for a peak it does, and re-defining the state's symbolic centre to fit the post-2020 geography rather than the constitutional one.
The Four Quadrants -- Four Historical Armenian Kingdoms
Around the central inescutcheon, the shield is divided into four quadrants, each carrying the heraldic symbol of one of the four major historical Armenian royal dynasties. Clockwise from the upper-left:
Upper-left (red): a lion passant carrying a cross. The Bagratuni dynasty. 9th to 11th centuries. Capital at Ani. The most powerful medieval Armenian state; Ani at its height held an estimated 100,000 inhabitants, comparable to Byzantine Constantinople of the period. The Bagratuni line ended when the Seljuks took Ani in 1064.
Upper-right (blue): a double-headed eagle in gold. The Arsacid dynasty. 1st century AD to 428 AD. The Armenian Arsacids ruled the kingdom that, under King Tiridates III in 301 AD, became the first state in the world to adopt Christianity as its official religion -- twelve years before the Edict of Milan, eighty years before Theodosius made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire.
Lower-left (blue): two eagles addorsed around a roundel. The Artaxiad dynasty. 2nd century BC to early Christian era. The line of Tigranes the Great (95-55 BC), whose Armenian Empire briefly stretched from the Caspian to the Mediterranean and whose coinage shows him wearing the Armenian tiara that survives, in stylised form, in the heraldry of his descendants.
Lower-right (red): a lion passant guardant carrying a cross. The Rubenid dynasty. 12th to 13th centuries. The Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, in the south-east of present-day Türkiye, on the Mediterranean coast. The kingdom that hosted the Crusaders' route, allied with the Mongols against the Mamluks, and was finally destroyed by the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt in 1375. The last Armenian royal house.
Together, the four quadrants are a compressed twenty-three-century historical claim: that the Republic of Armenia is the legal-symbolic heir of every Armenian state from the Artaxiads to the Rubenids. Substitute out the four-kingdoms shield and you substitute out the claim.
The Supporters and the Five Below-Shield Elements
The shield is held by a golden eagle on the viewer's left and a golden lion on the viewer's right. The eagle is associated heraldically with the Artaxiad and Arsacid traditions; the lion with the Bagratuni and Rubenid. The two supporters carry the eastern and western halves of historical Armenian heraldry simultaneously.
Below the shield, on the compartment ribbon, are five elements. A sword: power, the breaking of chains of oppression. A broken chain: the struggle for freedom and independence. A sheaf of wheat: the hardworking, agricultural character of the Armenian people. A feather (quill pen): the intellectual and cultural inheritance -- of Mesrop Mashtots, of the Matenadaran, of the world's third-oldest continuously used alphabet. A ribbon, in the three colours of the flag: red for the 1.5 million Genocide dead and the blood of those who fought for the nation, blue for the peaceful skies, orange for courage and creative labour.
Every element of the 1918 design carries an explicit claim. None of them are decorative.
Mount Aragats vs Mount Ararat -- The Political Grammar
Mount Aragats is geographically the highest peak inside the borders of the present Republic of Armenia (4,090 metres). Mount Ararat (5,137 metres) is the higher of the two but is in Türkiye. In the post-2018 Pashinyan vocabulary, Aragats is the mountain of "real Armenia" -- the mountain the state can credibly claim, climb, fly over, and place under its own jurisdiction. Ararat is, in this vocabulary, the mountain of "imaginary Armenia" -- the mountain of irredentist nostalgia and unrealistic territorial ambition.
The vocabulary is coherent on its own terms. The problem is that the Constitution of the Republic of Armenia is not written in that vocabulary. Article 21 puts Mount Ararat on the coat of arms by name. The substitution of Aragats for Ararat on the central state-ceremonial tribune of Republic Day 2026 is therefore the most public possible signal that the state has, in practice, adopted a vocabulary that the state's own constitutional text does not authorise.
Stalin's Retort
In 1945, after a fresh wave of Turkish diplomatic protest, Stalin was reportedly asked whether the Armenian SSR's coat of arms should remove Mount Ararat. His reply, transmitted through Armenian-Soviet sources and quoted in subsequent scholarship: the Turkish national symbol is the crescent moon, and the Turkish state does not, presumably, claim the moon. The Armenian SSR kept Mount Ararat on its coat of arms from 1937 until 1991, through every Soviet purge, every Cold War crisis, and every demand by Ankara to remove it.
It survived Stalin and the Soviet Union. The question is whether it will survive the Republic of Armenia's own elected government in 2026, removed not by foreign demand but by a roof shape on a parade tribune, a passport seal redesign, and an unpublished draft Constitution.
Sources: Coat of arms of Armenia (Wikipedia, with citations to Office of the President + Armenica.org) · Coat of Arms SVG, Wikimedia Commons (canonical) · Alexander Tamanian (Wikipedia) · Hakob Kojoyan (Wikipedia) · National Symbols of Armenia (Wikipedia) · Constitution Article 21 (arlis.am) · Azatutyun.am, Sept 2025 (passport seal)
