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 Turkic heritage and identity.
• Red for progress and the modernization of society.
• Green for Islam, the religion of most Azerbaijanis, and for Islamic culture.

The white crescent is also tied to Islam, and to the Turkic and Ottoman tradition of the crescent and star. The eight points of the star are often said to stand for eight Turkic peoples. These readings are traditional and not fixed by law. The three colors reflect a slogan from the early 20th century that called for Turkic identity, Islamic culture and modern European ideas.

History of the Azerbaijan flag

The flag was first adopted by the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, the first democratic republic in the Muslim world, on 9 November 1918, a few months after it declared independence from the collapsing Russian Empire. The republic lasted until April 1920, when the Red Army took Baku and the country became part of the Soviet Union.

During the Soviet period, Azerbaijan used red flags with the hammer and sickle, and the tricolor was banned. As the Soviet Union weakened, the old tricolor returned to use in the late 1980s. The Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic adopted it as its flag in 1990, and on 5 February 1991 the Azerbaijani parliament restored it as the republic's flag. It remained the flag after independence in October 1991 and is described in the constitution of 1995.

Flag Day is celebrated on 9 November every year. In 2010 Baku opened a large flag square on the Caspian shore, where one of the tallest flagpoles in the world, about 162 meters high, holds a very large flag.

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.