White over blue: the flag of Lucerne, documented since 1386, with no known medieval meaning and a modern trick of lake and snow.
Every fact about the flag, each with what it means.
Normal flagFIAV symbol: the form of the flag.
CivilFIAV symbol: who may fly the flag.The flag in the words of vexillology and heraldry.
It is a square field with a 1:1 ratio divided into two equal horizontal halves, white above and blue below, with no coat of arms or any other figure.
Each element and how many of the 1,390 flags in the catalogue carry it. In yellow, the rarest.
Every date in its story, at a glance.
Lucerne became an immediate of the Empire in 1241 and joined the old Confederation in 1332
The first certain record of the blue and white flag dates from 1386
It has been said that it comes from a “gonfalon” hung from a crossbar, which becomes horizontal…
How it was born, how it has changed and what it means.
The flag of Lucerne is a field divided horizontally: white above, blue below. One of the simplest in Switzerland and, at the same time, one of the ones nobody can fully explain.
Lucerne became an immediate of the Empire in 1241 and joined the old Confederation in 1332, the first city to do so. The first certain record of the blue and white flag dates from 1386.
The oldest seal has the vertical division, the flag the horizontal one. It has been said that it comes from a “gonfalon” hung from a crossbar, which becomes horizontal when it turns, but the theory is weak: the Lucerne flags of Arbedo (1422) and Murten (1476) were already horizontal. No change is known since.
Blue
for the popular modern explanation, the lake; no medieval document confirms it.
White
the snowy mountains, in the same reading; other theories see the colours of the Virgin Mary or the arms of the von Littau family, cut in a zigzag.
The popes gave Lucerne blessed standards in 1480 and 1512: the drawings already show it horizontal.
Seeing the lake in the blue and the snow in the white is recent popular culture, not ancient heraldry, but it helps: with the blue above, the lake would be in the sky.
In the war of the Sonderbund of 1847, the Lucerne battalions, from the canton that led the secession, fought with the federal cross on their flags.
Test what you have read about the flag of Lucerne.
Flag image: Cantone Ticino, Wikimedia Commons · Public domain.
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