Three vertical stripes in blue, yellow and red, born in the revolution of 1848. Without a coat of arms, it is almost identical to the flag of Chad.
Every fact about the flag, each with what it means.
Normal flagFIAV symbol: the form of the flag.
Civil, state and military, on land and at seaFIAV symbol: who may fly the flag.YesIt carries the coat of arms on the cloth.The flag in the words of vexillology and heraldry.
It is a rectangular field with a 2:3 ratio and three equal vertical stripes.
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.
The best-known reading comes from the revolutions of 1821 and 1848:
In 1848, the revolutionaries of Wallachia made the tricolour their flag
When the two principalities were united, in 1859, they adopted those colours
In 1866 the Constitution of the new country fixed them
How it was born, how it has changed and what it means.
The flag of Romania has three vertical stripes of the same size: blue, yellow and red. It is one of the easiest to draw and also one of the hardest to recognise, because that of Chad is practically identical and that of Andorra differs only by the coat of arms.
Two hundred years ago, Romania did not yet exist. There were two principalities, Wallachia and Moldavia, which depended on the Ottoman Empire. The blue, yellow and red already appeared on their flags and uniforms at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
In 1848, the revolutionaries of Wallachia made the tricolour their flag, with the motto “Justice, Fraternity”. When the two principalities were united, in 1859, they adopted those colours. In 1866 the Constitution of the new country fixed them, and the following year the order used today was settled: the blue by the flagpole.
The colours have not changed since 1848. What has changed is their order and the coat of arms in the centre.
1848
The revolutionaries of Wallachia use horizontal stripes with their motto written in the Cyrillic alphabet, which was then used for Romanian.
1862-1866
The united principalities set the stripes horizontally with the red on top.
1867-1947
The stripes become vertical, with the blue by the flagpole, as today. The king’s coat of arms appears only on the flags of the army and of the crown.
1948-1989
The communist regime adds its coat of arms on the yellow stripe: a landscape with mountains, forest and an oil derrick.
1989
In the December revolution, people cut the communist coat of arms out of the flags and took them into the street with a hole.
1989
On 27 December, the new government restores the tricolour without a coat of arms.
The law gives no official meaning. The best-known reading comes from the revolutions of 1821 and 1848:
Blue
liberty.
Yellow
justice.
Red
fraternity.
Chad adopted an almost identical flag in 1960. At the time the Romanian one carried the communist coat of arms and the difference went unnoticed. When it was removed in 1989, the two became identical except for a slightly darker blue in Chad’s.
In 2004 Chad asked the UN to examine the resemblance. The Romanian president, Ion Iliescu, replied that Romania did not intend to give up its flag.
The cut-out flags of 1989 became the symbol of the fall of the Ceaușescu regime.
Since 1998, 26 June is celebrated as Flag Day, in memory of the revolutionary decree of 1848.
Test what you have read about the flag of Romania.
Text based on the article “Bandera de Rumania” from the Spanish Wikipedia, published under the licence CC BY-SA 4.0.
Sources consulted:
Flag image: AdiJapan, Wikimedia Commons · Public domain.
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