Flag of Belarus

How to read it

The Law on State Symbols of 5 July 2004 (No. 301-Z) fixes the flag, as the President’s website describes it: two horizontal stripes, red above in two thirds of the flag’s width and green below in one third, with a red Belarusian national ornament on white running down the side by the staff, one ninth of the flag’s length. The flag is twice as long as it is high, and its staff is painted gold (ochre). The red and green flag was introduced after a referendum in 1995; it is the flag of the Byelorussian SSR, slightly modified and without the hammer and sickle, Nasha Niva says. In 2012 a decision of the state standards body (Gosstandart) dropped the white strips beside the ornament and widened the red pattern to fill its band. Belarus marks the Day of the State Flag, State Emblem and State Anthem on the second Sunday of May.

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The ornament

The pattern was woven in 1917 by Matryona Markevich, a peasant woman from the Vitebsk region, Nasha Niva says, and Store norske leksikon describes it as taken from a traditional ceremonial towel, the rushnik. On the Soviet republic’s flag of 1951–1991 the ornament was white on red, with red strips beside it; from 1995 to 2012 it was red on white with white strips; since 2012 there are no strips.

The white-red-white flag

Before 1995 Belarus had a different flag: three horizontal stripes, white, red and white. It became the national flag of the Belarusian People’s Republic, declared in March 1918, which lasted only a few months, Meduza wrote in August 2020. Independent Belarus adopted it again after the Soviet Union broke up, in 1991 according to Store norske leksikon, and in the 1995 referendum a majority voted to bring back the Soviet-era red over green flag without the hammer and sickle. In September 2020 Euronews reported that the white-red-white flag had been adopted by Belarus’s opposition movement and was visible at the demonstrations over the presidential election of August that year, while the official flag stayed red and green. Meduza and Store norske leksikon both say the opposition still uses it.