Holding Ararat: Gagat Glass and the shape of memory

For diaspora Armenians, Ararat has always been something you feel but cannot touch. Designer Hajk Bagradjans, founder of Gagat Glass, is trying to change that — one glass at a time.

There is a painting on the wall of almost every Armenian home in the diaspora. You know the one. Ararat — its twin peaks rising from the plain, vast and still, the lesser summit leaning into the greater as though in consolation. In Armenian households across the world, from Beirut to São Paulo, this image has presided over meals, arguments, births and silences for generations. Children learn to recognize it before they can name it. They grow up understanding, in some pre-rational part of themselves, that the mountain in the painting is not simply a mountain. It is the fact of an absence — a symbol of what was taken, fixed in pigment so that forgetting is never an option.

And yet, ask any Armenian what it feels like to fly into Yerevan — to press their face to the window and catch that silhouette emerging through the haze, unmistakable, ancient, impossibly familiar — and they will struggle to explain it. It is not only grief. It is pride and grief at once, a surge of belonging so immediate it bypasses language entirely. The mountain holds both at once, and always has.

Hajk Bagradjans grew up with that image in Germany, in a home shaped by the density of diaspora life — between cultures, languages, and the country he inhabited and the one he carried within him. He co-founded OQNI, a humanitarian initiative in Yerevan designing custom prosthetic covers for soldiers who had lost limbs in the 2020 Artsakh war. This was followed by Gagat Glass, a design house whose first object is a handmade, high-borosilicate glass formed around the silhouette of Ararat itself. Today, Bagradjans moves between Berlin, London and Yerevan. The thread connecting everything he has made returns, in different forms, to the same question: how to make present what absence has taken.

For most Armenians, reaching Ararat requires crossing a border that is as historical as it is physical. The mountain that defines the nation, visible on clear mornings from Yerevan, lies just beyond reach — within a country that does not recognize the events that displaced a people from its slopes. That distance is something Bagradjans has carried all his life.

Source։ ARMENIAN WEEKLY