jethroq:

Hey, it’s time for another installment of JethroQ rambles on about flags! It has been proven that at least three people in the past have given one (1) fuck about it!

Today’s topic is blue and yellow? Why? For no particularly good reason, I was just browsing the List of Countries by Colors of National Flags, as one does on a sunday night, and noticed the segment for blue and yellow was short, and decided to make a post about that.

The flags are in order: Kazakhstan, Palau, Sweden, and Ukraine. And as you can see, the designs go from elaborate to minimalist.

Let’s start with the most pimped out one; Kazakhstan. Oh, how little people know of you outside Borat (where the bits supposedly in Kazakhstan were actually shot in Romania, which technically speaking isn’t even in the same continent). Ninth largest country, and sinlge largest landlocked one. The flag itself suffers a serious case of Stanitis, or CISitis; the syndrome many former soviet republics fell to. Overdesigning the flags. Flaglog has posted some interesting chart about the flag. The gold trimming on the side is a national ornamenatl pattern, called a koshkar-muiz.

Palau bears semblence to the flags of Japan and Bangladesh, but is the odd one out. Quick quiz, why? If you answered “the circle is yellow”, I would dock you some points (becuase I’m always mentally playing QI when I ask people trivia questions like this). No, the answer I’m looking for is, that the red circle in the Japanese and Bangladeshi flags is the sun, but the yellow circle in the Palau flag is the moon. One might assume that an island nation in the pacific would have the sun in the falg, but that’s just cultural chauvinism! Just because to us they’re all sunshine and oceans doesn’t mean it’s how they view the world around them.

The Swedish flag is mostly based on the Danneborg, the oldest national flag still in use. The origin story of the Danish flag is, that it fell from heaven during a battle and lead the Danes to victory. The swedish flag’s story is similarly insipired, but at least marginally less fantastic. The story goes, that when the Swedish Christians landed in Finland to conquer my people and forcibly convert us to Christianity, the king saw a golden cross in the sky (obviously lens flare, duh), and saw it as a good sign.

Ukraine’s flag is quite boring. It’s a blue sky over a wheat field. Not much to say to that.

Bonus content: During the soviet era, many countries in the soviet bloc had flags in the style of the flag of the Soviet Union. They had the red top half with the hammer and sicle, and a bottom half with the national design. So, marvel at the imaginative work that went behind the flags of the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan and Soviet Republic of Ukraine:

As an added challenge, guess which is which. no cheating!

Reblogging, mostly to say that I do find these interesting, especially when they’re not about flags that are just bars of color.