Flag of North Macedonia

What the flag of North Macedonia looks like

The flag of North Macedonia has a red field with a golden-yellow sun in the center. The sun is a small disc surrounded by eight rays that widen toward their tips and run out to the edges of the flag. Four rays point straight up, down, left and right, and four point diagonally into the corners, so the flag looks like a sun that fills the whole field. Its width-to-height ratio is 1:2.

There are no other symbols, which makes it quick to recognize. It is often described as a stylized sun on a red background. It was designed by the Macedonian artist Miroslav Grčev. For image files see the download page, and the flag emoji is at /north-macedonia/emoji/.

Meaning of the North Macedonia flag

The sun refers to a line in the national anthem, Denes nad Makedonija ("Today over Macedonia"), which describes the "new sun of freedom" rising over the country. The eight rays are not tied to a specific official meaning. The red and yellow are older colors in the region: red has a long history in Macedonian revolutionary banners, including the flag of the 1903 Ilinden Uprising against Ottoman rule, and yellow or gold appears in many Balkan arms.

The sun, in general, is a symbol of light, life and hope, and the flag is usually read in that way. The Macedonian state does not publish an official explanation of the colors.

History of the flag of Macedonia

From 1946 to 1991 Macedonia was a republic of Yugoslavia. Its flag in that period was red with a red star edged in gold, in the style of other Yugoslav republics.

After independence in 1991 the country, then known as the Republic of Macedonia, adopted a new flag in 1992. It showed a sixteen-rayed yellow sun on red, the so-called Vergina Sun, a symbol found on a golden burial casket in the royal tombs at Vergina in northern Greece and associated with the ancient Macedonian kingdom. Greece, which has a region called Macedonia and considers the symbol part of its own heritage, protested strongly, and imposed a trade embargo on its northern neighbor in 1994.

In September 1995 the two countries signed an interim agreement. Under it, North Macedonia agreed to remove the Vergina Sun from its flag, and the new flag with eight rays was adopted on 5 October 1995. In 2018 the Prespa Agreement settled the long dispute over the name, and in 2019 the country officially became North Macedonia. The flag was not changed.

Flags that look like North Macedonia's flag

Other flags built around a sun on a solid field include Kyrgyzstan, which shows a yellow sun with forty rays on red, and Japan, which has a red disc on white. You can compare more designs on the flags of the world page.