Symbols are not just decorations or marks on paper. They live in people’s hearts. They are what a child draws when asked to picture their homeland, what an exile carries in memory when far from home, what generations use to connect past, present, and future. When a nation is stripped of its symbols, it is stripped of its anchor.
In Armenia today, that anchor is being loosened. Mount Ararat — a mountain that for centuries has stood as a silent witness to Armenian history, faith, and endurance — is quietly being erased from public life. Even the simple border stamp in a passport, once carrying its outline, is now redesigned without it. On the surface it looks like a small change, but for many Armenians it feels like a wound. A message is being sent: what once bound us together can be erased by decree.
History gives us warnings. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks went after the old symbols that tied people to their past. Crosses were torn down from church domes, icons smashed, monuments to heroes toppled. Traditional holidays disappeared from calendars. The goal was clear: to create a “new person” who no longer remembered where they came from, and therefore could be more easily controlled.
Today’s “war against Ararat” carries the same danger. Under slogans of modernization, the most familiar and cherished symbol of Armenian identity is being replaced by something sterile, something bureaucratic. Instead of a mountain every Armenian child recognizes, we are offered empty substitutes.
The Bolsheviks managed for decades to cut people off from their roots. The result was a society that lost its spiritual core, suffered repression, and struggled to remember who it really was. Armenia risks walking into the same trap: becoming a society without symbols, without memory, without uniqueness.
A decree cannot destroy Ararat. But silence and indifference can. Symbols survive only as long as people carry them in their minds and hearts. The real question is not whether the state removes Ararat from a passport stamp, but whether Armenians allow Ararat to be removed from their own consciousness. Because a war against symbols is, in truth, a war against the soul of a nation.
