Ceuta (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 Portuguese colony; between 1580 and 1640, Portugal was  united with Spain due to dynastic reasons and, after that, Ceuta was the only former Portuguese colony that chose to stay under Spanish rule.

No, it's not identical to Portuguese coat of arms, but the difference is subtle: the current Portuguese coat of arms has the seven towers arrenged 3-2-2, while Ceuta has the towers arranged 2-2-2-1.

But the Portuguese influence in Ceuta flag is even bigger. That's the flag of Lisbon, capital of Portugal:


The similarity is not coincidence: in 1415, when Portugal conquered Ceuta, the flag flown was that of Lisbon's patron saint St. Vicent (like above, but with coats of arms), apparently inspired by the heraldry of Dominican Order, important for Lisbon history.

In 20th century, the flag of Lisbon gyronny pattern become the standard for Portuguese cities, so the links between Portugal and the flag of Ceuta only grew.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Church 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 constituted by St. George's cross in the hoist and Dutch tricolor in the fly. Its use is reported as early as the 1670s.

But why the Dutch church pennant is identical to British church pennant, after all? A version tells that, at least once during the Anglo-Dutch Wars (second half of 17th century), both sides agreed on a temporary cease fire to religious services. Unfortunately, there's no confirmation if it's truth or myth.

A different version says that it's linked William of Orange's flag as King of England (William III), here on a reconstruction by Klaus-Michael Schneider:


Whatever is the origin, it's nice to notice how it survived in both sides of the North Sea to our days. (Just notice how it still used English instead of British flag.)

Comments and suggestions are welcome!

Ireland, India

You 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 William III of Orange, that inspired many Protestant banners), while the green represents the Catholicism (associated with Gaelicism). The white standed for the peace between that two religions...

Society of United Irishmen*	Order of Orange

A peace that wouldn't last much. The Protestant-majority Northern Ireland opted to remain in United Kingdom while  the Catholic-majority remaining of the island gained the independence. Since then, the relationship between nationalists (that want Northern Ireland to join Republic of Ireland, usually Catholics) and unionists (that want it to remain in UK, usually Protestants) had ups and downs.

The flag of India was adopted in 1947. It's almost identical to the then-flag of Gandhi's party, the Indian National Congress, but with spinning wheel replaced by a Ashoka Chakra, representing the law and dharma.

The colors were chosen based in the most important religions of India: orange (officially described as "saffron") for Hinduism (probably borrowed from Maratha Empire), green for Islamism (probably taken from Mughal Empire) and white for the remaining religions.

Mughal Empire*	Maratha Empire*

The flag, however, gained new symbolism. In the words of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, that would later became the second Indian president:

Bhagwa or the saffron colour denotes renunciation of disinterestedness. Our leaders must be indifferent to material gains and dedicate themselves to their work. The white in the centre is light, the path of truth to guide our conduct. The green shows our relation to (the) soil, our relation to the plant life here, on which all other life depends. The "Ashoka Chakra" in the centre of the white is the wheel of the law of dharma. Truth or satya, dharma or virtue ought to be the controlling principle of those who work under this flag. Again, the wheel denotes motion. There is death in stagnation. There is life in movement. India should no more resist change, it must move and go forward. The wheel represents the dynamism of a peaceful change.

The hope for an united India was short-lived: mainly-Muslim Pakistan (later divided in Pakistan and Bangladesh) wouldn't stay much time in the union, and the relationship between the two countries wouldn't be always friendly.

So similar in look, so similar destiny...

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

* Historical reconstructions.

Novorussian 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, for this post, it's important that the Russian flag is fresh in your mind, specially the exact sequence of the colors: white-blue-red.


If you look at the table below, you may noticed some patterns:

• All republic flags are tricolor;
• Most of them have two stripes in common to Russian flag showed above;
• No republic flag is directly based in Ukrainian oblast flag, even when it was already a tricolor;
• Ukrainian blue-yellow doesn't appear in any flag [e.g. Dnepropetrovsk].

I must remember the column "Source?" shows only my hypothesis, so they may not necessarily correspond to reality.

Oblast	Oblast flag	Republic flag	Source?
Dnepropetrovsk			Don Cossacks: blue → black Imperial Russia: white → red This variant Russia : white → purple
Donetsk			Russia: white → black
Kharkov			Russia: white → green
Kherson			Russia: red → white
Lugansk			Russia: white → sky blue
Nikolaev			Russia : red →  black
Odessa			Possibly inspired by the city of Odessa, very important port during Russian Empire. This variant Russia: white → yellow[?]
Zaporizhia			Kuban People's Republic: change of ratios

As I had to redo some flags, here's an all-new map based on the first image, but showing the whole of Ukraine [Crimea disputed area is shown hatched]:


Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Italy [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 represented by the Lion of St. Mark (symbolism from Revelation 4:7), because it's believed that the body of the evangelist rests in the cathedral of that city.
• Genoa was the first of many Northern Italian cities to adopt the St. George's cross, but probably there isn't connections between that and the St. George, even though he's patron saint of Genoa.
• The Amalfi's is very similar to Maltese cross (but with blue background instead of red), and it's possible that the former predates the latter: merchants from Amalfi founded the hospital where the Order of St. John (Knights Hospitaller) was based.
• The cross of Pisa was granted by pope Benedict VIII to the fight against Saracens in Sardinia.

While the anverse of the flag shows St. Mark's lion's head, the reverse shows his tail...


Additionally, the merchant vessels politely flies a jack without the sword. The open book reads "Pax tibi Marce, evangelista meus" ("May peace be with you, Mark, my evangelist"), what, following the tradition, an angel said to Mark when pointing his burial place at Venice.


Comments and suggestions are welcome.

United 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:


How is this design done? Pick the current flag and remove the blue. But, differently from popular knowledge, it's not 100% free of "Scottishness".

As I antecipated in this article, the strange look of St. Patrick's cross (the red saltire i.e. diagonal cross) is due to its merge with Scottish St. Andrew's cross. What a parcel of media forgot was that, without Scottish saltire, the flag would look like this:


This layout is, by far, bolder and more equilibrated. Obviously, many other design could be taken into consideration, and media did it; some of them kept the blue, others added elements to Wales and, more rarely, Cornwall.

Comments are welcome!

Gibraltar (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 the English conquest of the rock, the original grant of arms was made by Queen Isabella the Catholic, of Castile, commemorating the Spanish "re-conquest" of the place.

And the coat of arms and, consequently, the flag, is emerged in Spanish symbolism: the castle is pun on "Castile" and the biggest symbol of that kingdom, now part of Spain. The key represents the nickname of "key of Spain", although this metaphor has its origins at the time the Arabs still controlled the rock.

The most ironic thing on this flag becoming a symbol of loyalty to the British crown, in my opinion, is the fact that the Spanish never stopped using it as their own symbol. At the English takeover of the rock, most of Spanish residents of Gibraltar moved to a recently-established city called San Roque (notice the pun on "St. Rock"). As most of San Roque's earlier government was strongly linked to Spanish Gibraltarian one, they kept using the coat of arms, and now fly this flag:


A "Gibraltarian" flag with a Spanish crown. Yes, this is something that would cause much confusion to an unsuspecting.

Comments are welcome.

Netherlands [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 similar to the image below. So, why the orange?

The answer is: this is the color of the House of Orange-Nassau, the royal house of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Although the Princes of Orange seems to have used the orange fruit as one of their symbols, orange was, curiously, the livery color of the House of Nassau. The original flag of Netherlands was orange-white-blue, but the first was gradually substituted by red along the years.

Several members of the House of Nassau appears on portraits with a orange bend, like this, representing Henry Casimir I of Nassau-Dietz, painted by Wybrand de Geest:

With the foundation of the House of Orange-Nassau, the orange color became a symbol of Dutch royal house. On the royal birthdays, for example, the national flag should fly with a orange pennant above, as a sign of allegiance:

With time, orange was turning from a royal color to a national color, and became a symbol of Dutch pride. Its use was specially remarkable during WW2, when the country was occupied by the Nazi.

You can return watching the World Cup now... Comments are welcome!

León (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 homeland. For use on the battlefields, the legions used a flag with a purple lion passant on white or light gray cloth, something like this:


As the use of the purple lion by León (first half of 12th century) predates the adoption of the fleurs-de-lis by France, lions by England and the pales by Aragon/Catalonia, it may be, possibly, the oldest royal symbol documented.

With the birth of heraldry, the purple lion would, naturally, fill a coat of arms. And here comes the most interesting part of this story! According to a study by Ricardo Chao Prieto, the Mediaeval idea of horror vacui ("fear of the empty") made the lion passant be rotated 90º degrees, what eventually made it a lion rampant. Look at the image:


Prieto's thesis has some merit: while the lion passant roughly feels one third of the escutcheon, the lion rampant occupies the full shield; England addopting three lions passant guardant may not be coincidence. And, although it may sound unintuitive, a lion rampant looks a lot like a lion passant rotated.

Currently, the flags most commonly used by Leonese nationalists have the coat of arms (the one with the, usually crowned, lion rampant) in a purple or crimson background. This flag arrangement wasn't used during Middle Ages, what points to a more recent origin. Similarly, the Spanish province and city of León currently use the silver shield with the purple lion rampant on background from red to purple.

Comments are welcome!

New 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 distracted Western sources, that often record them as widely used flags.

According to artist's page, the colors were chosen due to their wide use on Ukrainian oblast flags. Moreover, the flag can be obtained from combinations of Ukrainian and imperial and current Russian flags, as you can see below:

The second is the flag of New Russia Party, a Russophile Ukrainian flag behing the Novorossiya idea. Its flag, backed by many photographs, consists only of the white-blue-red of current Russian flag.

I've saw many Americans noticing the similarity between the flag above and the contemporary Confederate flag, but its most probable origin can be other: the Russian naval jack, below.

This flag consists of the union of St. George's and St. Andrew's cross, like the Great Britain flag, but on reverse order of colors. The naval jack was part of a set of flags designed by czar Peter I the Great himself. At the time, Peter I travelled to many European states, with the goal of forming an anti-Ottoman alliance (he failed) and modernizing Russia, and, on his stay on England, the Union ensign may have inspired him to create the Russian own jack.

But the flag, anyway, has a strong significance to Russia: St. Andrew, having preached along the Black Sea and region, is Russia's patron saint (curiously, Ukraine's, too), and St. George have been Moscow's city patron saint for centuries. The two saints also names important Russian military orders.

Comments (critiques, suggestions, corrections, additional info) is welcome.

Crimea

The flag of Crimea has appeared on many newspapers on last days. This post will not discuss the politics related, but the flag itself.

If you read or watch news recurrently, it's very possible that you have saw this flag:


If you look carefully, the design is rare and curious.The central stripes is too wide compared to whole flag. The reason is it isn't an untouched flag. In 1992, five flag proposals were presented to the Crimean parliament, that chose proposal #5, by A. Malgin and V. Trusov, that was identical to current flag, except for a detail...


Yes, the coat of arms. The white area was originally destined to it, but Crimean parliament decided not to use the arms on the flag, leaving it blank. Vexillology is also made by intentions and should-bes...

I don't know any documents containing the rationale of each of the submitted proposals at the time. While the colors are the same of the coat of arms, it's not clear if the use of Pan-Slavic (or, more specifically, Russian) colors were intentional.

Comments are welcome.

Sochi (Krasnodar, Russia)

Winter Olympic Games are occurring right now, and it's a good occasion to review the flag of the Sochi, the host city, that's rarely appearing on media coverage. This flag:


The flag is inspired on the coat of arms of Sochi, that has origins on a Soviet-era coat of arms (later re-adopted, without the hammer, the sickle and other ornaments), therefrom the very abstract representation that's considered bad heraldry. It could be a good logo to a resort city like Sochi, but not a flag or coat of arms.

And what all those thingies on the flag represent? Each quarter represents one of four administrative areas of the city: the snow mountains represent the ski resorts of Adler district; the palm tree represent the Khostinsky district, that includes the biggest arboretum of Russia; the sun represents the Central district an its development, but also the beach season that lasts about ten months; the wavy line represents the Black Sea coast on Lazarev district. On the center of the flag, a bowl of flaming water, representing the spa resort on Matsesta river: Matsesta means "flaming water", because of the skin redness caused by the therapeutic factors present on its waters.

Well, the flag of Sochi leaves the good impression that Sochi is much more than Winter Olympics. We all hope it is!

Comments are welcome.

Stockholm city (Sweden)

Some flags have a really curious history, and Stockholm, the capital of Sweden and biggest city of Scandinavia, is one of those cases that deserves their own "review".

The flag of the city of Stockholm:


You may be asking: "Who's the man on the flag?".

Well, the answer is not that simple. The banner of arms of Stockholm is blue and yellow (Swedish flag colors) with the head of St. Eric, former king and patron saint of Sweden, associated with many popular legends. The arms of the city is inspired by a mediaeval seal of the city. The combination of colors and charges is excellent to denote the importance of Stockholm to Sweden.

So the man on the flag is St. Eric? Don't be so sure.

During the standardization of Stockholm coat of arms, in early 1930s, inspiration were took from a statue on Roslags-Bro Church, that can be saw below.


The curious history about it all is that, currently, that statue is considered to most probably represent another saint: St. Olaf, king and patron saint... of Norway!

Comments are welcome.