Flag of Georgia

What the flag of Georgia looks like

The flag of Georgia (the country) has a white field and five red crosses. A large St George's cross, with arms of equal length, runs to the edges of the flag and divides it into four rectangles. In each rectangle sits a smaller cross, known as a Bolnisi cross. This type of cross is called a bolnur-katskhuri cross, also known as the Georgian cross or grapevine cross.

The flag is proportioned 2:3 and has only two colors, red and white. It is usually called the five-cross flag. The design is easy to recognize because few flags in the world have this arrangement of crosses, and it is sometimes confused with the flag of England, which has a single red cross. A small version is shown on the Georgia flag emoji page, and image files are on the download page.

Georgia flag meaning and symbolism

The large red cross is the cross of Saint George, the patron saint of Georgia. Georgians have a strong tie to the saint: churches named for him are found across the country and he appears on the coat of arms, slaying a dragon. A red cross on white was also the first Georgian flag design, used in the early Principality of Iberia, and it is similar to the flag of England.

The five crosses are sometimes interpreted as representing either the Five Holy Wounds of Christ, or Christ and the Four Evangelists. These are interpretations rather than an official statement. The layout resembles the Jerusalem cross, which is shown as the flag of Tbilisi on a 1367 map by Domenico and Francesco Pizzigano.

History of the Georgian flag

The flag was originally a banner of the medieval Kingdom of Georgia. A white flag with a single red cross was supposedly used by King Vakhtang I in the 5th century, and a red-on-white Jerusalem cross is shown as the flag of the Kingdom of Georgia on a 14th-century map by Domenico and Francesco Pizzigano. In 2021 a coin from the reign of King David IV was found with an engraving that the State Council of Heraldry says shows a folded five-cross composition.

In the 20th century the country went through a series of flags. The short-lived Democratic Republic of Georgia (1918-21) used a dark cherry flag with a black and white stripe in the canton. After the Soviet takeover, Georgia had Soviet flags: first red with Georgian letters and later red with a hammer and sickle and a blue stripe. The 1918 flag replaced the Soviet-era flag in November 1990 and was formally reestablished on 8 December 1991. It stayed until 2004.

The five-cross design was used by the Georgian patriotic movement after 1991. In 1999 Parliament passed a bill to change the flag, but President Eduard Shevardnadze did not endorse it. The opposition United National Movement, led by Mikheil Saakashvili, adopted the flag as a symbol of resistance and of the Rose Revolution. Parliament adopted it on 14 January 2004, and Saakashvili endorsed it by Presidential Decree No. 31 on 25 January. 14 January is marked as Flag Day in Georgia.

Georgia the country vs. Georgia the U.S. state

Many searches for the "Georgia flag" are about the U.S. state, whose flag has nothing to do with the country's five-cross flag. The state flag has red-white-red stripes and a blue canton with the state coat of arms inside a ring of 13 stars, for the original thirteen colonies. See the Georgia state flag for its meaning and history.