Flag of Poland - Related and Similar Flags

Related and Similar Flags

The flag of the Grand Duchy of Posen, a Polish-populated autonomous province of the Kingdom of Prussia created in 1815, was a red-and-white horizontal bicolor. Its colors were taken from the duchy's coat of arms which consisted of the Prussian Black Eagle with an inescutcheon of the Polish White Eagle. With Germany's increasingly anti-Polish policy and a rising identification of white and red as Polish national colors, the red-and-white flag of Posen was replaced in 1886 with a white-black-white horizontal triband. No other part of Poland during the time of Partitions used a flag that would incorporate Polish national colors.

Today, many flags used in Poland are based on the design of the national flag. This applies especially to flags defined by Polish law and used by the Polish military and other uniformed services, such as the naval ensign – a swallow-tailed horizontal bicolor of white and red defaced with the arms of Poland in the white stripe. Flags of some administrative subdivisions also resemble the national flag. Examples include the former flag of the Lower Silesian Voivodeship – a horizontal bicolor of white and red defaced with the arms of the voivodeship – or the flag of the Lesser Poland Voivodeship – a horizontal tricolor of white, yellow and red with the yellow stripe half as wide as any of the other two.

Due to the horizontal bicolor being a relatively simple and widespread flag design, and white and red being the most popular colors used on flags, there are many flags worldwide that are similar or near identical to the flag of Poland despite being unrelated to it. For example, the historical flag of Bohemia, the major historical region of Poland's southern neighbor, the Czech Republic, consists of two horizontal stripes, white on top and red on bottom. Similarly to the flag of Poland, it is of heraldic origin, the coat of arms of Bohemia being Gules, a lion rampant, queue fourchée Argent, crowned, langued and armed Or, that is a silver double-tailed lion in a red field. The white-and-red Bohemian flag came into use when Bohemia was a province of Austria-Hungary and, after the end of the First World War in 1918, it was shortly used as a flag of the newly formed Czecho-Slovak Republic. In 1920, in order to avoid confusion with the Polish flag, a blue triangle was added to create a flag used by Czechoslovakia until its dissolution in 1993 and currently used as the flag of the Czech Republic.

Other examples of flags that could be confused with the Polish one include the civil flags of the following regions: Kranj, Slovenia; Thuringia, Germany; Upper Austria and Tyrol, Austria; as well the city of Honda, Colombia. Furthermore, the Dutch city of Maastricht used a similar design between 1938-1994 but reinstitated its old flag to avoid confusion. There are currently two independent states – Indonesia and Monaco – whose national flags are horizontal bicolors of red and white, reversing the Polish flag. The Monaco and Indonesia flags differ in proportions and shades of the colors (see Flag of Indonesia and Flag of Monaco).