tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-44137890907842918252024-03-13T00:53:54.065+00:00Flag ReviewHave you ever looked to this flag? Really? Look again!Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger85125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-84722412807916262942015-12-27T16:23:00.001+00:002015-12-27T16:23:20.009+00:00Ceuta (Spain)Ceuta is a Spanish exclave in Northern Africa (more precisely, Morocco), a rare reminiscent of centuries of colonization. And with a puzzling flag.
This is the flag of Ceuta:
As I said, Ceuta is considered part of Spain. But the coat of arms in flag is Portuguese, right? More or less...
Yes, it's practically identical to Portuguese coat of arms, and History explains it: Ceuta used to be a Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-80777058982315709062015-10-03T22:50:00.002+01:002015-10-03T22:50:55.087+01:00New Zealand [five finalist proposals]This November 20th, a new step in New Zealand flag referendum will be started: choosing the design that will compete with current flag the next.
There were four designs originally announced, but a fifth design was added.
The first design was made by Alofi Kanter:
I think it's pleasing for the eyes, and a big pro is the similarity with traditional silver fern flag, used by NZ in sports and Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-31993984389331557282015-08-27T19:38:00.001+01:002015-08-27T19:38:29.933+01:00CubaOne flag-related event that happened this month was the re-opening of American embassy in Cuba and Cuban embassy in USA, with their historical flag-hanging ceremonies.
I think this event vexillologically fascinating, because the Cuban flag is probably inspired in American flag. The theory is the following: Narciso López, a Venezuelan filibuster exiled in New York, engaged in Cuban struggle for Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-25032089144438156262015-07-30T23:40:00.000+01:002015-07-30T23:40:35.779+01:00New Zealand [Studio Alexander's proposal]The New Zealand flag referendum is soon to happen — next September, the four finalists will be selected. Meanwhile, economist and philanthropist Gareth Morgan organized a private contest for proposals of new NZ flags by "genuine designers". The winner entry was design by Auckland-based Studio Alexander.
This is the current New Zealand flag:
And this is $20,000 worthy winner entry, called wā Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-19003970190775275112015-06-30T03:12:00.000+01:002015-06-30T03:15:04.867+01:00Fiji [2015 finalists]This June 30th, the public feedback channel of the 23 finalist designs will be closed and another round of the adoption of new Fijian national flag will start: the feedback will be sent to Parliament, where the new flag will be debated and chosen before October 10th, Fijian Independence Day.
This is the current Fiji flag:
It isn't an ingenious design, but the light blue of Pacific stands out. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-8240950398398954522015-05-28T16:04:00.002+01:002015-05-28T16:04:42.234+01:00Planet Earth [Oskar Pernefeldt's proposal]One of biggest flag-releated news to pop on world's internet this month was the proposal of "The International Flag of Planet Earth", by a Swedish designer named Oskar Pernefeldt. According to the official site, it was designed as a graduation project.
Have you seen this design?
I sincerely like the design, even though it's a bit complicated.
According to the site, the objective of the Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-12302611923372172932015-04-30T15:01:00.001+01:002015-04-30T15:01:15.020+01:00Church pennant (United Kingdom, Netherlands)Church pennants are used in warships to denote, usually, that its staff is on religious service or funeral. In signal of respect, it's avoided to send any kind of messages to ships flying the church pennant, except in emergency.
Today I'll present one interesting flag mystery: Why are the British and Dutch church pennants identical? They look like this:
In both countries, the pennant is Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-56314087034591223552015-03-31T13:17:00.001+01:002015-03-31T13:17:16.492+01:00Māori people (New Zealand)Now and then, the flag of the Māori, native Polynesian people from New Zealand, appears in media. These time, in the course of NZ flag debate, due to the upcoming referenda — even tough that design probably won't be considered, as it originally represents an ethnic group of the country, not the country as a whole.
This is the most famous Māori flag:
The colors of the flag — black, red (Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-74753245473820304062015-02-28T02:15:00.003+00:002015-02-28T02:15:58.789+00:00Ireland, IndiaYou may have noticed that both India and Republic of Ireland national flags are green and orange. But there are much more coincidences among the flags.
The tricolor flag of Republic of Ireland dates back from the first half of XIX century, but was revived for the Easter Rising (1916) and the Irish War of Independence soon after.
The orange represents the Protestantism (a reference to King Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-285099036889934152015-01-21T17:46:00.000+00:002015-01-21T17:46:17.556+00:00Novorussian Federation?I've found the following image in social medias, and I immediately became obsessed by it. Since the post about Novorussian flags was one of my most visited ever, I decided to make a post with some of my hypothesis about this image.
The flags for Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkov republics are well-known by the media. The others, however, are likely to be imaginary flags.
You already know it, but, Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-57795674860314764542014-12-26T00:26:00.000+00:002014-12-26T00:26:16.979+00:00Cusco (Peru)I'm currently backpacking at South America and, as one could expect, a stay in Cusco and Machu Picchu was on the plans. The most curious flag I found so far is municipality of Cusco's.
This is the cusqueña flag:
The only difference between this flag and the current LGBT flag is that the latter has just six stripes, omitting the light blue. Curiously, the interval between the adoption of both Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-16783947640667929642014-11-24T13:36:00.002+00:002014-11-24T13:38:22.130+00:00Palestine [Larousse (1939)]Last weeks, an image has been circulated in the internet, spreading a lot of lies. It's a photograph of the flags appendix of the 1939 edition of Larousse Encyclopedia [click to zoom]:
What's so polemic about it? In the second page, third row, third column, iy's possible to see a flag labelled as "Palestine", whose design is like below:
Many people have argued that it's an ultimate Unknownnoreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-78036965088551127622014-10-31T14:26:00.003+00:002014-10-31T14:26:52.172+00:00Bolivia [naval ensign]Bolivia is currently a landlocked country, losing its remaining sea cost in the 1879-1883 War of the Pacific (not to be confused with the WW2's Pacific theater). It's surely not the only landlocked country in the world with a navy, but having a distinct naval ensign is certainly curious, specially for its symbolism.
This is the reported naval ensign of Bolivia, created in 1966:
In the Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-5417109694076771182014-10-18T22:22:00.002+01:002014-10-18T22:22:36.935+01:00Italy [jack]A jack is a naval flag flown by warships and other vessels at the head of a ship. On today's post, we'll see the curious Italian jack.
That jack is very different from Italian flag:
This flag contains four quarters, each one representing, respectively, one of the main Italian "maritime republics" or thalassocracies (from Greek, "rule of the sea"): Venice, Genoa, Amalfi and Pisa.
Venice is Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-30986048816485988942014-09-21T02:02:00.002+01:002014-09-21T02:02:36.352+01:00United Kingdom without Scotland [fictional]September 18th, 2014. That day, Scotland had the change to vote for its independence from United Kingdom, in a referendum. In the breakfast of the next day, the votes count confirmed the "No". However, in the upcoming weeks, there were many predictions about a hypothetic United Kingdom without Scotland, including the flags.
Among those flags, one of the most commonly found was the following:
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-11774295134676299802014-08-31T05:09:00.002+01:002014-08-31T05:09:56.368+01:00TongaIf you had to choose a flag to be used forever, unchanged, how would it look like? Tonga made its choice already.
This is the flag of Tonga:
Since the 1840s, European missionaries arrived in the islands with the goal of converting the natives to Christianity. They were successful: according to last census, more than 90% of the population profess a branch of this religion.
When the first king Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-90443974127119858472014-08-19T17:54:00.001+01:002014-08-19T19:52:27.589+01:00Gibraltar (United Kingdom)The flag of Gibraltar is one of most curious cases of symbolic transfer. It's currently carried as a strong symbol of loyalty to the British crown (as you can see on these photos), what strongly contradicts its historical origins.
This is the flag of Gibraltar:
This flag is a banner of arms (a rectangular version of a coat of arms) of Gibraltar. Although confirmed by the College of Arms after Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-29644286867188602852014-07-28T04:56:00.000+01:002014-07-28T04:56:03.691+01:00NamibiaHow many persons in the world had the luck of designing not one, but two national flags, from two different countries? Frederick Brownwell, that served for almost twenty years as South African state herald, had this privilege and used it to create two of the most awesome national flags around the world.
Apart from being the chairman of the committee that chose Namibian national flag (the public Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-8110893167711055542014-07-19T21:05:00.000+01:002014-07-19T21:05:34.845+01:00Bonaire (Netherlands)The island of Bonaire is a special municipality of Netherlands located in the Caribbean Sea. Its flag is possibly, one of the most successful created by a committee, that included, among others, the famous vexillologist Whitney Smith.
The final proposal of the committee, however, was other:
The compass rose represents the inhabitants of Bonaire, that came from the four corners of the world, Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-33051547680405378012014-06-30T16:43:00.003+01:002014-06-30T16:43:35.145+01:00Netherlands [football]Every time world turn its eyes to football (also known as soccer in North America), some questions arise: "Why Italy use blue?", "Why the Netherlands use orange?", etc. As the Netherlands are still alive in competition, I'll focus today on them.
The Netherlands use orange on his home jersey, and on the official KVVB (Royal Dutch Football Association) online shop, you can find a supporter flags Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-4649439211143739312014-06-17T06:13:00.000+01:002014-06-17T07:28:19.317+01:00León (Spain)In many posts from this blog, I've written about flags inspired by coats of arms. On this review, we'll look how curious can be the opposite phenomenon: a coat of arms based on a flag!
The kingdom of León's name comes from "legion", but the pun with "lion" was quickly noticed. While many European kingdoms were fughting the Crusades, the kingdom was fighting against the Moors in its own Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-5507941547819135652014-05-30T18:56:00.000+01:002014-05-30T18:56:06.068+01:00New Russia / Novorossiya, Russia (naval jack)A new unrecognized nation, Novorossiya (literally, "New Russia"), appeared on Ukraine, claiming territories from Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts. According to current reports, it's unlikely to exist an official flag, but interesting proposals appeared on internet. I'll talk about two.
The first is from somebody nicknamed "arcktick". The photographs skillfully edited on Photoshop may have confused Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-33438890128521194412014-05-19T03:11:00.001+01:002014-05-19T03:11:45.757+01:00Book Review: Flags Through the Ages and Across the World (Whitney Smith)
I've recently acquired the monumental Flags Through the Ages and Across the World (1975), by Whitney Smith, Ph.D. considered the founder of the "vexillology" (by the way, this word was created by him), the study of flags. It has more than 350 pages, 2257 artwork pieces made exclusively to the book, , featuring the masterpieces by Franz Coray, and many selected deluxe Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-602555756882752772014-04-29T05:28:00.001+01:002014-04-29T05:28:52.248+01:00Alaska (USA)Hey, Hollywood, what about a movie about the history of Alaskan flag. It has a rare history for a flag, and it happened on American territory... Well, I did my part.
The history of Alaskan flag starts with Benny Benson, a 13-years old boy with Aleutian blood. When he was three years old, his mother had died, and his father was forced to send his brother and him to orphanage. The year is 1927, Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4413789090784291825.post-55510087032312535872014-04-18T01:16:00.001+01:002014-04-18T01:16:14.656+01:00World Heritage ConventionYou may have seen the today's flag yet. No matter in what continent you live. There's a flag granted to all the UNESCO's World Heritage sites, occasionally also used by the entities that protect te sites.
There are many variants of the flag, but you'll find more commonly these two:
The first, red on white, the second like UNESCO flag (white on UN blue). The inscriptions in English ("WORLD Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0