Weird Flags From Around the World

Last night, I was watching a rerun from Season 5 of The Big Bang Theory - "The Beta Test Initiation". A side story for this episode is Sheldon and Amy introducing a new YouTube podcast called Sheldon Cooper presents: Fun with Flags. The podcast is aimed to teach vexillology (the "scientific study of the history, symbolism and usage of flags or, by extension, any interest in flags in general"), which got me wondering what are the strangest flags found around the world. A few hours of research today and I am astounded! Who knew that there were so many weird flags? (Yes, this is how I spent the first few hours of my April vacation. I'm such a nerd.)

Flags today are primarily something to wave while yelling something at a sporting event, or something to roll yourself up in before attending a town council meeting, or to express yourself in some other, more subtle way. While most flags are fairly simple and convey a clear message, others can be a little busy… or just plain incoherent. Here are ten notably odd flags:

West Africa

The best and most concise description of this flag probably comes from the British National Maritime Museum which displays it: “A red wool bunting flag with a linen hoist, machine sewn with a rope halyard attached. The design is applied in white fabric with painted details, representing a naked man decapitating another with a sword.” The link above shows the actual flag.

Yes indeed, what you see are two totally naked dudes in a very one-sided fight; one wonders why the naked dude without the sword didn’t just run away. The origin of the flag is much more confusing: While popularly labeled “Flag of the Benin Empire” and indeed captured during a British raid on the capital city, the flag is said to be very similar to flags born by the allied Itsekiri forces.

At this point, the issue is moot, as Benin has long since been absorbed by Nigeria and by now everyone understands that the proper reaction to a nude man with a sword is to flee immediately.

Guam

Guam -- a Western Pacific American territory covered in tree snakes, Japanese tourists, and the military -- depends primarily on tourism for its income, so the design of their flag makes a certain amount of sense. It looks as if they've just bought a T-shirt from the nearest souvenir shop and put it on a flag pole. Even if this was the case, I have a hard time believing that they couldn't find a better T-shirt.

Here's the thought process for creating this flag: “You want palm trees? We got palm trees. How about a sailboat? Bam, sailboat right there. Now, just in case you forgot where you’re going, we’re gonna print the name of the island right there in the center, see? G-U-whoops, tree’s in the way-A-M. What about the rest of the flag? Eh, whatever, we don’t have much else to talk about on this island. Watch out for snakes, I guess.” I'm not even going to talk about the horrendous red border around the seal and the flag edge. Horrible!

Baie-James

A huge and sparsely populated municipality of Quebec containing the world’s largest and most powerful hydroelectric power complex, the Municipalite de Baie-James was recently dissolved and reorganized as the Eeyou Istchee James Bay Territory after an agreement with the local Cree natives.

As a result, the municipality’s oddly unsettling flag -- combining the terrifying power of hydroelectricity with the knowing gaze of an Arctic owl -- is now a collector’s item.

Will the fierce Hydroelectric Owl swoop down on the dreams of Quebecois and Cree legislators like they were terrified raccoons? It’s hard to say for sure, but I will venture to say that yes, that is absolutely what is going to happen.

Isle of Man

Yeeaugh! The Isle of Man, a pleasant island in the Irish Sea known for cats and motorcycle races, is represented by one of the oldest and weirdest European symbolic motifs: the triskelion.

The triskelion is typically a combination of three spirals but in this case is represented by three bent, armored legs, for reasons which have been lost to history but were probably still weird even at the time. In order to have the toes pointing clockwise on both sides of the flag, a two-sided emblem is used.

Dating back to the European Iron Age, the triskelion is popularly associated with early Irish and Gaelic cultures but has been seen as far south as the Mediterranean, possibly due to the three legs jumping off of the flag and running at incredible speeds across the Iberian Peninsula.

Nepal

Nepal’s flag is the only one in the world that isn’t quadrilateral. Why? Because screw you, that’s why, and also because the tiny country’s location on the peaks and high valleys of the Himalayas are echoed by the jagged twin-pennant design.

The blue border symbolizes peace while the red is the color of the rhododendron, Nepal’s national flower; the moon represents both soothing calm and the cool temperature of the Himalayan highlands, while the sun represents fierce resolve and the relatively warmer temperature of Nepal’s lower foothills.

Fun fact: The sun and moon both used to feature little people faces until 1962, when the decision was made to “modernize” the flag by making it much less cute. Boo!

Antwerp

Those of you who still have retinas might remark on how remarkably, uh, colorful the flag of the Province of Antwerp is. Up until 1997, the province was represented by a rather blah tricolor that saw so little use that some provincial authorities were said to have forgotten it existed.

Recognizing a need for a memorable flag, historians looked to Antwerp’s past as part of the Brabant provinces, known for their colorful checkered flags, and combined the three color combinations of Antwerp (red-white), Mechelen (yellow-red), and Turnhout (blue-white) into an … erm ... arresting … display of regional pride. It's a chess board on acid.

The flag is now a crucial part of the Belgian defense system, being flown at times of national emergency in order to stun and confuse invading armies and perhaps even induce seizures.

Mozambique

There are many good options when you’re looking to put together a really threatening flag -- lions, dragons, eagles, lion-dragon-eagle hybrids -- but when Mozambique’s Soviet-influenced FRELIMO party gained power in June of 1975 they decided to really embrace modernity with a silhouette of an AK-47 with fixed bayonet right on the flag.

They accompanied the gun with a jumble of Soviet imagery: a huge cogwheel, an open book of learning, the Marxist revolutionary star, and a hoe (somewhat difficult to identify in silhouette) all over the traditional Mozambican colors of red, black, yellow and green. The flag currently used today has gone unchanged since 1983, when they ditched the cog-wheel, and while many in the Mozambique parliament would prefer not having a huge Communist rifle on their flag, the country has yet to find a suitable replacement. One would think that pretty much ANYTHING would be better than a AK-47!

Wallonia

What is wrong with Belgium? Antwerp's flag is bad enough, but a rooster? Wallonia is the predominantly French-speaking southern region of Belgium. It is governed as the Walloon Region, which makes up 55% of the territory of Belgium but with only a third of its population.

The rising of a Walloon identity led the Walloon Movement to choose different symbols representing Wallonia. Walloons have a deep reverence for that saucy iconic French rooster of song and legend, Chanticleer. Chanticleer is a rooster from a children's fable designed to teach children that the fox is smarter than the rooster, or something. He also appears in the movie Rock-a-Doodle, meaning the Wallonian flag violates the most important rule of flag design: your flag shouldn't be based around any characters that could logically appear in a movie called Rock-a-Doodle.

Just imagine going into battle behind a jive-talking rooster. By the way, the French name of this flag is le coc hardi - I swear!

Libya (1977-2011)

The flag used in Libya between 1977 and 2011 goes under the category of "most boring". Strictly speaking, this is the flag of the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, a confusing mouthful of Communist and Muslim buzzwords that represented Muammar Gaddafi’s desire to unify the two opposing systems of Soviet totalitarianism and Islamic theocracy. Or at least his desire to continue receiving money and arms from both systems while never really supporting either.

The color green has deep significance to many Muslims, being associated with the color of paradise and with the flags of the original prophet Muhammad, and by lucky coincidence was closely tied to the Tripolitania region of Libya.

So, when it came time to roll out the philosophies of Gaddafi’s “Green Book," the old Republic triband was dipped in green and Gaddafi started making speeches in a keffiyeh. After Muammar had an unfortunate encounter with a bayonet, Libya went back to the flag of the Kingdom of Libya, a rather classy red-black-green triband with white star and crescent.

Sicily

YEEEEAAAUGH! Severely upping the ante on the Isle of Man’s triskelion, the traditional flag of Sicily features three nude legs seemingly joined by the winged head of Medusa and individual stalks of wheat.

The Sicilian triskelion (called by Sicilians the trinacria for “three limbs”) is thought by a few to be even older than the Isle of Man’s. Pliny the Elder attributing the design to the (roughly) triangular shape of the island.

The wheat obviously enough represents the island’s agricultural origins, and the red and gold diagonal represent the municipalities of Palermo and Corleone, respectively. The winged Medusa head is said to protect the residents of the island, presumably as long as they avoid eye contact with it.

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Honorable Mentions: These are the flags which I found nearly as interesting, but didn't quite make the top 10 list. Bhutan (kick ass dragon), Central African Republic (hideous and seizure inducing), Friesland (are those Chinese fortune cookies?), Krygyzstan (a tennis ball blocking out the sun?), Lombardy (creators of the game of jacks?), Northern Mariana Islands (looks like clipart), Swaziland (spears are better than AK-47s, I suppose), and U.S. Virgin Islands (just plain ugly).