Sunday, February 22, 2009

Serbia - The Flag

I received this card (together with one more flag card, which I'm going to show you later) from Ana as a total surprise :) Thank you very much! :)

This card shows the flag of Serbia with a small Coat of arms.
I love flag cards, although they're quite hard to find, much harder than the map cards. In my city, which is quite popular tourist destination, you can find at least 100 different postcards (probably more), but no normal map or flag cards. I travel quite often, so I can say that in some cities and countries you can easily find a map card (for example in Belgium), but you can rarely find a flag card showing nothing else but the country's flag. This makes me even more grateful for this surprise :)


The flag of Serbia is a tricolour with Pan-Slavic colours, with three equal horizontal fields, red on the top, blue in the middle and white on the bottom, which is really the flag of Russia upside down. The same tricolour, in a number of variations, was the flag of Serbia throughout history, and is the National flag of Serbs. On the State flag there is a small Coat of arms of Serbia centered vertically and located left of center by one-seventh of the flag's length.

The Coat of Arms of Serbia is the same as the coat of arms of the former Obrenović dynasty (first adopted in 1882; re-adopted in 2004) and features the white bicephalic eagle of the House of Nemanjić (which in turn took on the eagle from the Palaiologos dynasty of the Byzantine Empire). An ermine cape of the style once worn by kings is featured in the background. The double-headed eagle has been used since Byzantine times, the Serbian cross has been used since the 12th century.
Small coat of arms of Serbia is also known as kokarda.

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