Fly into Tbilisi and one Georgian symbol grabs your eye before the food or the wine ever does: a white banner cut by five red crosses, rippling over the old town rooftops. Locals call it the Five Cross Flag. The…
A blue, yellow and red tricolor stands guard over the Pyrenees, and it belongs to a country of just 468 square kilometers wedged between two much larger neighbors. The Andorra flag tells that story without a single word. Read its…
Every flag tells you something about power. The Vatican flag tells you about two kinds at once. Split down the middle in gold and white, crowned with a coat of arms that has outlived empires, it flies over the smallest…
Fly into Monte Titano on a clear morning and the first thing you notice, before the towers even come into focus, is a strip of white and blue snapping in the wind above the rock. That is the San Marino…
Deux bandes horizontales, rouge et blanc, sans blason, sans étoile, sans emblème surchargé. Le drapeau de Monaco intrigue autant par sa simplicité que par son âge : la principauté l’arbore sous cette forme depuis 1881, ce qui en fait l’un…
Most flags borrow something from someone. The Cyprus flag was built to borrow from no one. A white field, a copper colored island, two green olive branches, nothing pulled from Greece, nothing pulled from Turkey. It was designed at a…
Fly into Malta and past the honey colored bastions of Valletta, the first Maltese symbol you actually notice is the flag: white and red, split clean down the middle, with a small cross tucked into one corner. The Malta flag…
Stand on a balcony in Luxembourg City on a bright June morning and you might swear you are looking at the Dutch flag. You are not. The Luxembourg flag shares the same red, white and blue stripes as its northern…
Two horizontal bands, one blue on top, one red below, with a small gold crown resting in the corner. That is the Liechtenstein flag, and it happens to be one of the only national banners in the world modified specifically…
Andorra is easy to overlook on a map. Wedged between France and Spain in the eastern Pyrenees, it covers less than 470 square kilometers and has a population smaller than most mid-sized European cities. But its flag rewards attention. Three…
