Flag of Azerbaijan

How to read it

Article 23 of Azerbaijan’s constitution describes the flag: three stripes, blue at the top, red in the middle and green at the bottom, with a white crescent and eight-pointed star in the middle of the red stripe on both sides, and a width to length of 1:2. A constitutional law of 2 November 2018 (No. 1331-VKQ) adds that the ends of the crescent point towards the star to its right, and sets the colours for printing and manufacture as Pantone 306C for the blue, Red 032C and 362C for the green. The flag was first adopted by the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic on 9 November 1918, and the Supreme Soviet recognised it as the national flag again on 5 February 1991, the President’s office records. Under a presidential order of 17 November 2009, 9 November is National Flag Day.

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The flag of the 1918 republic

The government of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic adopted the tricolour at a meeting in Baku on 9 November 1918. It kept its status until the republic fell in April 1920 and was lowered outside the parliament building on 3 May 1920, the President’s office writes. The Supreme Assembly of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic made it Nakhchivan’s flag on 17 November 1990, on the initiative of its chairman, Heydar Aliyev, and asked the Supreme Soviet to recognise it for all Azerbaijan, which it did on 5 February 1991. The designer was Ali bey Huseynzade (1864–1940), according to Store norske leksikon. The tricolour replaced a red flag with a crescent and star adopted on 21 June 1918, identical to the Ottoman flag except for the number of points on the star; the encyclopedia says the country’s ethnic and religious minorities disliked it as too one-sidedly Turkish, which led to the more inclusive flag, with the symbol of Islam as its main element.

Telling it from Turkey’s and Uzbekistan’s flags

Turkey’s flag has a white crescent and star too, on a plain red field, as the Turkish flag law describes it, and its star has five points where Azerbaijan’s has eight. Uzbekistan’s flag is also blue at the top and green at the bottom, but its middle stripe is white, edged with thin red stripes, and its white crescent and twelve stars sit on the blue by the pole.