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Flags of the World
Page created: 30th March 1997
Last updated: 14th December 2005 		[The FAME - Flag and Arms of the Modern Era]

The FAME is site devoted to systematic and scientific study of flags and coats of arms. Such symbols often bear strong political and other messages. Inclusion of those symbols here does not mean that the author support or approve the ideas they may stand for.

The Flags & Arms of the Modern Era

About the FAME

See also:

About the Author

Please, see my full resume and bibliography.

About these Pages

These pages are devoted to flags and coats of arms that were and are used in some countries of Central and Southeastern Europe in XIX and XX century. These pages are result of a systematic and scientific research of those symbols, using all to me available sources limited only with time and resources that I can devote to them.

The purpose of these pages is not to present all those, well known, flags and coat of arms of countries that are easily found in general literature and other Web pages. Therefore, on these pages you may find historical flags and coat of arms, flags of administrative divisions, political parties, unofficial flags and proposals and even some flags of "doubtful" authenticy that are to be found in sources or otherwise known in public.

I began with the flags and coats of arms that I was most familiar with - those of the countries in the region I live in. Until now the topics of this presentation covered to various extent over five countries in my neighbourhood, with different level of in-depth study. However, in some segments these pages are the first publication of the often obscure material and they became a kind of authority for local flags of Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Since in this region the coat of arms are as a rule part of the flag design, or are at least used as basis for the design, it is not possible to study flags without looking into their corresponding coats of arms. Therefore, the coats of arms are virtually processed in equal level of details, even if that was not my first intention - that is the job for a herladists not a vexillologist. But, of course, vexillology is still a young study, born from heraldry and it is no doubt that the two shall stay interlinked for ever.

Of course, there are still many flags that are missing - these pages are always "under construction" and are constantly updated with new data, new information and findings. Many missing flags are missing either because it is not known if they are adopted as yet and what they look like, or because I miss firm information to be able to present a decent image. It is, as a rule, difficult to obtain information on details of the coats of arms that are part of design of many flags, and it is even more difficult to trace the primary sources - official gazettes and similar documents adopting flags and coats of arms or regulating their use.

If you have more information, or better if you have an image of any flag that you think it should be included here, I kindly ask you to contact me. Naturally, all corrections, proposals and other comments are welcome.

Finally, the flags can be presented in many ways: by description, by symbolic, by the story of their origin etc. but I decided to present them mainly with images. I tried to include as much as possible information on documents adopting and regulating the use of the flags and coats of arms. Wherever it was possible, I included information such as ratios, dates, short historical notes and flag usage symbols. According to the available data I tried to explain the reasons behind the symbolic, eventual legends or stories that explain why some design was chosen, and that sometimes represent the most interesting part of these pages - at least in my opinion. Again, I should stress that such information is not acquired easily, and I welcome any further input from you.

Ah, yes, what do I mean when I say "Modern Era"? It is quite a fuzzy term and quite relative also, but by it I count all those flags and coats of arms that are used after around AD 1848. The year that is otherwise quite remarkable in European history and also the year in which are born many of the modern national flags. But, of course, saying that does not mean that I shall ignore any older flag, especially if the inclusion of such is justified for reasons.

Disclaimer and Copyright

Disclaimer

Even if the author gives his best to present the material on this pages as accurate as possible, he renounces any responsibility for damage, direct or indirect, that would be caused by inaccuracies or otherwise information from these pages.

The flags and the coats of arms can express certain political and/or other ideas. Displaying of flags and coats of arms on these pages does no mean that the author agrees or disagrees with such ideas.

Copyright

Material presented on these pages can be used, if:

Notes on Orthography

For English version:

I have tried my best to represent here the names of states and their subdivisions as accurate as possible. But, various problems connected with international standards of character sets (what is known as "code pages") doesn't allow to present all of the characters needed. Therefore, I have chose to give entire text in only one code page, and that is the standard American one (ISO-8859-1, commonly known as 'Latin 1'), and probably most widely used, especially on the Net. In fact that is the W3C recommendation for HTML 3.2 Wilbur standard. This code page has some of the "foreign" characters, but not all that would be necessary here. Those that are possible to represent with it (e.g. "umlauts") are used throughout, but those that are not (e.g. "Slavic letters with hacheks") are replaced with their "unaccented pairs". Therefore you'll find here "Kärnten", but "zupanija" and "Varazdin".

Until the standards are improved, this will have to remain so, unfortunately.

For Croatian version:

The Croatian text would be totally crippled without the diacritics. But, including the letters with diacritics (č, ć, đ, dž, š, ž - c hachek, c acute, d dash, dz hachek, s hachek, z hachek) does not enables HTML 3.2 compatibility.

Until the standards are improved, this will have to be so, unfortunately.

For the correct display in the browser it is necessary to set up the options to code page ISO-8859-2. The Central-European fonts, or encoding, should be used - e.g. Times New Roman CE, or Times New Roman/Encoding Central European.

Although the author gives his best to present the issues in both languages the same, the basic version is considered the one in English. If the data doesn't match, please, inform me about that.

Sources

Books

Periodicals

Information

Provided by:

The specific sources, typically the legal papers, are cited by each flag where known. Some of these sources are quoted according the bibliography, which is explicitly noted.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank for the help in making of these pages to all the people that unselfishly provided information, suggestions and designs of flags. Especially, I want to thank to, in no particular order:

Mail any reaction, suggestion, correction, addition, contribution or other "-tion" to zheimer@public.carnet.hr


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The FAME. Copyright © 1996-2006 by Zeljko Heimer. All rights reserved.