Flag of Armenia

An overview

The national flag of Armenia — the Yeraguyn, the tricolor — is three equal horizontal bands of red, blue, and orange in a 1:2 ratio. It carries no emblem, and the law permits flags of any size that keep the proportion.

The design was proposed to the First Republic’s assembly on August 1, 1918, flew until the Soviet conquest of 1921, and spent nearly seventy years banned before returning over Yerevan in 1988. The Supreme Soviet restored it as the state flag on August 24, 1990 — the day after declaring sovereignty — and the Law on the National Flag of June 15, 2006, gave the modern flag its full legal frame: the official meanings of the colors, the display rules, and the buildings where it always flies.

The colors are standardized to the decimal: the Armenian National Institute of Standards fixed the exact shades — Pantone, hex, RGB, and CMYK — in 2012.

Red, blue, and orange

The combination is traditionally traced to the royal banners of the Rubenid dynasty of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia — red, blue, and yellow — with orange taking yellow’s place in 1918. By the account on record, Stepan Malkhasyants proposed the colors to the assembly without assigning them meanings; the members supplied readings of their own, and the state finally fixed the official ones 88 years later, in the 2006 law.

The orange had one early stumble: the cloth was so hard to source that in September 1918 the interior minister, Aram Manukian, instructed government institutions to use yellow until orange could be had. The parliament reaffirmed the tricolor in June 1919.

Design and official specification

The 2006 law sets the flag at 1:2 — three equal horizontal stripes of red, blue, and orange from the top — and expressly allows smaller and larger flags in the same proportion. The construction and colors were standardized by SARM in 2012. The First Republic’s flag had flown at 2:3; the modern 1:2 dates from the 1990 restoration.

Official color specification

Armenia’s colors are fixed by a national standard: the 2012 specifications of SARM, the Armenian National Institute of Standards, define the three shades across print and screen — one of the few flags whose CMYK values are official.

Symbolism and meaning

Armenia’s meanings are law: Article 2 of the 2006 Law on the National Flag assigns each color its significance.

The man who proposed the colors gave them no meanings at all — the readings grew with the flag, and the law made them official in 2006.

How the flag evolved

The tricolor’s story runs from a funeral in Paris to a republic of two and a half years, through seven decades of prohibition, and back — the same three colors carried across more than a century.

1. 1885

   Alishan's designs

   

   With no state of their own, Armenians had no flag — until the Armenian Students Association of Paris asked Father Ghevont Alishan for one to carry at Victor Hugo's funeral. His first design stacked red and green for the Easter Sundays of those names, with white to complete it; a second used red, green, and blue — the rainbow Noah saw from Ararat.

2. 1918

   The First Republic

   

   On August 1, 1918, at the new republic's first assembly, the scholar Stepan Malkhasyants presented a now-lost report proposing red, blue, and orange — offering no meanings for the colors, which members traced to the royal banners of Cilicia. The flag was set at 2:3 and framed as temporary, pending a constituent assembly; it flew until the Red Army's conquest in 1921.

3. 1952

   The Soviet stripe

   

   Under Soviet rule the tricolor was banned. The Armenian SSR's first flag of 1922 was a red banner with gold Armenian initials; from 1952 the republic flew red with a horizontal blue stripe through the middle, the hammer, sickle, and star in the canton.

4. 1990

   The Yeraguyn returns

   

   In May 1988 the banned tricolor flew over Yerevan for the first time in over sixty years. On August 24, 1990 — the day after declaring sovereignty — the Supreme Soviet made it the state flag, now at 1:2; full independence followed on September 21, 1991, and the 2006 law fixed the flag's meanings, display rules, and standing in law.

Who designed the Armenian flag?

Stepan Malkhasyants — the philologist, lexicographer, and academician best known for his dictionary of the Armenian language. By the memoir of Simon Vratsian, later the republic’s prime minister, Malkhasyants presented a report on the flag at the assembly’s first session on August 1, 1918, proposing the horizontal red, blue, and orange; the report itself has not survived.

What the record preserves is the design’s modesty: proposed without meanings, set at 2:3, and framed as temporary until a constituent assembly could choose a permanent flag. That assembly never met — and the temporary tricolor became one of the region’s most enduring symbols.

Legal status and display rules

The Constitution establishes the tricolor among the state symbols — Article 13 of the 1995 text, Article 21 since the 2015 revision — and leaves the detail to law. The operative statute is Law No. 149 of June 15, 2006, successor to the restoration law of August 24, 1990. Under its Article 3 the flag is always displayed at the residence of the President, the National Assembly, the Government, the Constitutional Court and the courts, the Prosecutor’s Office, the Human Rights Defender, the Central Bank, and state and local government buildings, including Yerevan’s city hall.

The law’s etiquette is exact: the flag flies whole, clean, and unfaded, its lower edge at least 2.5 m (8.2 ft) off the ground. In mourning it is lowered to half-mast with a black ribbon fixed at the top — the ribbon as long as the flag itself. Flag Day is June 15, the law’s own anniversary, first celebrated in Yerevan in 2010; daily display is encouraged, and required on specified holidays.

Things you may not know

The flag once ran out of orange. The First Republic could not reliably source orange cloth — so in September 1918 the interior minister ordered institutions to fly red, blue, and yellow until the proper shade could be found.

It was adopted as temporary. The 1918 assembly framed the tricolor as a stopgap, at 2:3, pending a constituent assembly that would pick a permanent flag. The assembly never convened; the stopgap has now outlasted empires.

The anthem sews it. Armenia’s national anthem, Mer Hayrenik, devotes two verses to the flag — a sister describing the tricolor she stitched through sleepless nights as a treasured symbol for the nation.