Flag of Montenegro

How to read it

Article 4 of the Constitution of 2007 makes the coat of arms the golden double-headed eagle with a lion on its chest, and the flag red with the arms in the centre and a golden border. The Law on State Symbols and Statehood Day (Službeni list RCG 47/2004) fixes the rest in Article 5: the flag is twice as long as it is high, the arms take two thirds of its height with their centre where the diagonals cross, and the gold border is a twentieth of the shorter side wide. Store norske leksikon dates the flag to 12 July 2004, when it replaced the tricolour that the union of Serbia and Montenegro had flown since 1993. For indoor use there is a version hung upright, with the arms turned 90 degrees.

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The eagle and the lion

The arms adopted in 2004 are a crowned gold double-headed eagle with red tongues, holding a sceptre in one claw and an orb in the other, Store norske leksikon says. On its breast is a shield edged in gold, with a gold lion walking on blue above a green base. The lion is the lion of Judah, for the princes’ former role as bishops, and also stands for the Republic of Venice. The arms are a reworking of those of the Petrović-Njegoš dynasty, which ruled Montenegro from 1696 to 1918; the Crnojević dynasty bore a gold double-headed eagle on red as early as 1326. The leksikon traces the double-headed eagle, found in the arms of many Balkan states, to the Eastern Roman Empire.

Telling it from Albania’s flag

Albania’s flag is red with a double-headed eagle in the centre too, but its eagle is black and it has no border. Montenegro’s eagle is gold, with the lion shield on its breast, and a gold border runs round the whole flag.

An earlier red flag

From 1852 to 1905 the princes Danilo I and Nikola I flew a red flag with a white double-headed eagle, Store norske leksikon says.