A white, blue and red tricolour with Mount Triglav on the coat of arms, born in 1848 and very easy to confuse with the Slovak one.
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 1:2 ratio with a coat of arms at the top by the flagpole.
Each element and how many of the 1,390 flags in the catalogue carry it. In yellow, the rarest.
How it was born, how it has changed and what it means.
The flag of Slovenia has three horizontal stripes: white, blue and red. At the top, on the left, it carries a small coat of arms with a mountain. Without that coat of arms it would be almost identical to Russia’s, and it looks a lot like Slovakia’s, a country Slovenia is often confused with.
The colours come from Carniola, an old territory of the Austrian Empire where much of the Slovene population lived. Its coat of arms had a blue eagle on a white ground, with a crescent of red and gold checkers on its chest.
In 1848 half of Europe was living through revolutions, and many peoples were asking for their language and culture to be recognised. In April of that year, in Ljubljana, someone hung a German flag on the castle. In response, a student called Lovro Toman took a white, blue and red tricolour out into the street. From then on it was the flag of the Slovenes, although Austria almost never accepted it officially.
The order of the colours has never changed. What has changed over time is the symbol on top of it.
1848-1918
The tricolour with no drawing at all represents the Slovene people within the Austrian Empire.
1945-1991
Slovenia becomes a republic of Yugoslavia, a communist country. The flag carries a red star with a yellow border in the centre.
1991
With independence, the star disappears. In its place comes the new coat of arms, the work of the artist Marko Pogačnik.
The colours remember Carniola. The coat of arms, on the other hand, speaks of the landscape and the history of the country:
White, blue and red
the colours of the old coat of arms of Carniola.
White mountain
Triglav, the highest peak of Slovenia, at 2,864 metres.
Two wavy lines
the Adriatic Sea and the rivers of the country.
Three golden stars
they come from the coat of arms of the counts of Celje, a very powerful Slovene family about six hundred years ago.
On independence day, in June 1991, the flag raised in Ljubljana was much longer than usual: about four or five times as long as it was high. It stayed on the mast throughout the brief war that followed, to give encouragement.
Slovenia and Slovakia have such similar names and flags that the post often ends up in the wrong country. There is a story that their embassies in Washington meet every month to exchange letters. Both embassies deny it, though in London, in the nineties, they really did do it.
Triglav means “three heads”. The most likely explanation is that the mountain is named after Triglav, an ancient three-headed Slavic god.
Test what you have read about the flag of Slovenia.
Text based on the article “Bandera de Eslovenia” from the Spanish Wikipedia, published under the licence CC BY-SA 4.0.
Sources consulted:
Flag image: Original: Marko Pogačnik Vector: Achim1999, Wikimedia Commons · Public domain.
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