Flag of Azerbaijan

What the flag of Azerbaijan looks like

The flag of Azerbaijan consists of three horizontal stripes of equal width: light blue on top, red in the middle and green at the bottom. The ratio of height to width is 1:2. In the center of the red stripe is a white crescent opening toward the fly (the right side), with a white eight-pointed star between its horns.

Because it has both a crescent and a star, the flag is sometimes compared with the flags of Turkey and Pakistan, but the horizontal tricolor and the eight-pointed star make it quite different. You can see it as an icon on the Azerbaijan flag emoji page.

Azerbaijan flag meaning and symbolism

The three colors are usually explained like this:

• Blue for Azerbaijan's Turkic heritage.
• Red for progress, the creation of a modern state and the development of democracy.
• Green for Islam, the majority religion of Azerbaijan.

The crescent and star are typically seen as markers of Islam, though historians disagree about why the star has eight points. One view points to the eight letters of the word "Azerbaijan" written in Arabic. The eight points are also thought to stand for eight Turkic peoples. The three colors were borrowed from Ali bey Huseynzade's concept of Turkifying, Islamizing and Europeanizing, which matched the ideas of Turkism, Islamism and the desire for progress.

History of the Azerbaijan flag

The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic declared independence on 28 May 1918. Its first flag, adopted on 21 June 1918, was a white crescent and eight-pointed star on red, close to the old Ottoman flag. The tricolor was approved as a draft on 9 November 1918 and raised over the parliament building on 7 December 1918. The republic lasted until April 1920, when the Red Army invaded and Azerbaijan became a Soviet republic.

During the Soviet period the tricolor was banned and the republic used several Soviet flags. In the late 1980s the tricolor returned in demonstrations calling for independence. The Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic adopted it on 17 November 1990, and the Supreme Soviet of the Azerbaijan SSR ratified it as the national flag on 5 February 1991. It remained the flag after independence, and the constitution of 12 November 1995 describes it.

Flag Day is celebrated on 9 November every year, marking the first adoption of the tricolor in 1918. A national flag square was built in Baku, and a flag museum at its flagpole opened on 1 September 2010. The 162-meter pole was briefly the world's tallest unsupported flagpole, but it was dismantled in 2017.

Azerbaijan flag compared with other flags

Azerbaijan is a neighbor of Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Iran and Russia, but none of their flags look the same. Turkey has a white crescent and star on a red field. The Armenian flag has red, blue and orange horizontal stripes. Azerbaijan is the only flag among them to combine blue, red and green with a crescent and an eight-pointed star.