November 1st, 2025 will be remembered as a symbolically unsettling date: Armenia has decided to remove the image of Mount Ararat from the country’s entry and exit stamps. According to the official resolution, the measure seeks to “comply with international standards” and “align with the ideology of Real Armenia.” In other words: Ararat will no longer be the first or last image travelers see when crossing the homeland’s borders.

But this is not a technical or aesthetic matter. No one can believe that Ararat —that mountain rising before Yerevan like a petrified prayer— can be replaced by a “more legible” stamp. What is at stake is not the form of a stamp, but the shape of a nation’s soul.

Ararat is not merely a landscape: it is the geological biography of Armenia, the mirror of its identity, the mountain where, according to the biblical tradition, Noah’s Ark came to rest. It is the image of origin and rebirth. To remove it from official documents is to attempt to reduce the State to a machine without memory, as if modernity required amnesia.

Let us look around: no neighboring country has renounced its essential symbol.
On Georgia’s coat of arms, Saint George the warrior-saint defeats the dragon —faith and resilience.
In Azerbaijan’s, the eternal flame of Zoroastrian fire recalls the ancestral power burning beneath the earth.
Iran writes its creed into its emblem, where word and sword merge into a single gesture of faith.
And Turkey, though lacking a traditional coat of arms, has turned the crescent and the star into an absolute symbol of identity and religion.

All have preserved their founding emblems. Because nations know that symbols are not ornaments of the past, but compasses toward the future.

Armenia, however, has always chosen a mountain: a natural, human, and universal emblem. Neither weapon nor god nor flame — a summit that represents permanence and hope. Its coat of arms, with Ararat and the Ark at its center, flanked by the lion and the eagle, is not a mere design; it is a moral declaration. It is the promise of continuity, even when history seems to collapse.

That is why erasing Ararat from a seal is more than an administrative decision: it is an act of symbolic uprooting. A nation may change its governments, its policies, or its borders —but it cannot renounce its founding myth without risking the loss of itself.

Ararat cannot be erased. Not by decree, not by diplomatic calculation, nor by the will of those who mistake reconciliation for surrender. Relations may be “normalized,” but forgetfulness will never be normal.

The mountain will remain —visible from Yerevan, invisible on the stamps, yet eternally engraved in the Armenian conscience. And as long as there is a surname ending in -ian, there will be a root leading back to Ararat: to origin, to identity, to continuity.

Governments pass. Borders are negotiated. Symbols endure.

Ararat does not need to appear on a stamp to remind us who we are.
It is we who must remind the world.