Flag of Svalbard and Jan Mayen

What the flag of Svalbard and Jan Mayen looks like

The flag shown for Svalbard and Jan Mayen is the Norwegian national flag: a red field with a blue cross bordered in white. The cross is a Nordic cross, with the vertical bar shifted toward the hoist. The proportions are 8:11.

The territory is listed under the code SJ, and the Svalbard and Jan Mayen flag emoji repeats the Norwegian design. The full flag, with its history, is on the page for Norway. Svalbard has no distinct flag of its own; one was proposed in 1930 but not adopted.

Meaning of the Norwegian flag

The flag's designer gave no written explanation of his colors, but historians infer them from his letters. Red and blue are understood to refer to Denmark and Sweden, Norway's former and then-current union partners, while red, white and blue together were chosen as colors of freedom, as in the French, Dutch and American flags. The Nordic cross stands for Christianity.

How the territories became Norwegian

Svalbard was sighted by the Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz in 1596, and for centuries it was used by whalers from several countries. The Svalbard Treaty of 1920, which came into force in 1925, gave Norway full sovereignty but let citizens of all signatory countries live and work there. Jan Mayen, named for the Dutch captain Jan Jacobszoon May, was annexed by Norway in stages in the 1920s and became part of the Kingdom of Norway in 1930.

The Norwegian flag was designed in 1821 by Fredrik Meltzer, and its union emblem with Sweden was removed from the national and state flags in 1898.

People and places

Most of the roughly 2,900 residents live in Longyearbyen, the main settlement on Svalbard. Barentsburg is a Russian mining community. Jan Mayen has no permanent residents, only a small staff at the Norwegian weather and military station.