Flag of North Macedonia

How to read it

Article 5 of the Constitution has the arms, the flag and the anthem adopted by law, by a two-thirds majority of all the Assembly’s members. The Assembly passed the Law on the Flag (Služben vesnik 47/95) on 5 October 1995 without debate, 110 votes to one with four abstentions, the Macedonian Heraldry Society records. Article 2 describes the flag: red with a golden-yellow sun whose eight rays run from the disc out to the edges, along the diagonals, the horizontal and the vertical. The disc’s diameter is a seventh of the flag’s length, its centre is where the diagonals meet, and the flag is twice as long as it is wide. It is the national flag, the state flag and the war flag in one, Store norske leksikon says. It was first raised on 7 October 1995 at the Assembly building in Skopje, and on 22 October outside the United Nations headquarters in New York.

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Why the flag changed in 1995

The flag of 1992 to 1995 showed the Vergina sun, a star of sixteen rays, Store norske leksikon says. It is named after Vergina in northern Greece, where excavations in 1977 found a gold burial casket (larnax) of King Philip III of Macedon decorated with it. Under Article 7 of the Interim Accord between the two countries, signed in New York on 13 September 1995, the country agreed to stop using the symbol shown on its national flag in any form; Greece’s foreign minister confirmed in a letter the same day that the symbol meant was the Sun or Star of Vergina. The Assembly adopted the present flag three weeks later.

Who designed it

Store norske leksikon names the architect Miroslav Grčev as the designer. The Macedonian Heraldry Society credits Grčev’s proposal, amended by the artist Kostadin Tanchev Dinkata, who changed its original golden-ratio proportions to 1 to 2 and set the rays apart from the disc; the society calls it the Grčev-Dinkata design.

How the sun is drawn

The law says the rays follow the diagonals, but the drawing that is part of the law builds them differently, the Macedonian Heraldry Society found. Each of the two horizontal, two vertical and four diagonal rays starts at a different point, and only the horizontal ones meet at the centre. The disc’s radius is a seventh of the flag’s height.

Telling it from Kyrgyzstan’s flag

Kyrgyzstan’s flag is also red with a gold sun in the middle, but its sun has 40 short rays round a disc drawn as a tunduk, the crown of a yurt’s roof. North Macedonia’s sun has eight broad rays that reach the edges of the flag.