Flag of Azerbaijan

An overview

The national flag of Azerbaijan — the Üçrəngli Bayraq, the Tricolor — is three equal horizontal bands of bright blue, red, and green in a 1:2 ratio, with a white crescent and an eight-pointed star centered on the red band, on both faces. The description and ratio sit in the constitution itself, in Article 23.II.

The design belongs to the first republic: adopted on November 9, 1918, by the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, banned after the Soviet invasion of 1920, revived in the independence demonstrations of the late 1980s, and restored to law on February 5, 1991 — by which time Nakhchivan had already flown it for three months. On land it serves as the civil, state, and war flag; at sea, as ensign and naval jack.

Its three colors carry a program: the blue of Turkic heritage, the red of progress, and the green of Islam — one band for each word of Ali bay Huseynzade’s call to "Turkify, Islamicize, Europeanize."

The crescent and the eight-point star

The white crescent and star carried over from the republic’s first flag of June 1918, an Ottoman-inspired red banner that lasted less than five months. The star kept a distinction of its own: eight points, not five.

Two explanations are on record. Fatali Khan Khoyski, the first republic’s head of government, pointed to the eight letters of "Azerbaijan" as written in the Arabic script. Tradition reads the points instead as the Turkic peoples of the old classification — Azerbaijanis, Ottomans, Chagatais, Tatars, Kipchaks, Seljuks, and Turkomans, the Kipchaks possibly standing for two peoples to complete the eight.

Design and official specification

The constitution fixes the form — three equal bands, the crescent and star, the 1:2 ratio — and the flag laws fix the practice, down to the rule that a vertically hung flag rotates so the green band hangs to the left. The exact shades have their own statute: standardized to Pantone on October 22, 2013, and ratified in 2018.

Official color specification

Azerbaijan’s shades are set by standard: the October 22, 2013 specification — ratified in 2018 — names the Pantone for each band, with RAL and CMYK values fixed alongside. The restored flag of 1991 had flown for two decades under the 2004 decree’s slightly different values.

Symbolism and meaning

The tricolor reads as a sentence — three ideas from the nationalist thinker Ali bay Huseynzade, one per band.

The crescent and eight-point star add the older layer — Khoyski’s eight letters, or the eight Turkic peoples, depending on whose account you read.

How the flag evolved

A party banner, a republic’s flag, a banned symbol sewn in exile and smuggled home, and a restoration that began in Nakhchivan — the tricolor’s century, in four moves.

1. 1918

   Two flags in one year

   

   The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic declared independence on May 28, 1918, and reached for symbols at once: its first state flag, adopted June 21, was a red banner with a white crescent and eight-pointed star, after the Ottoman model. On November 9, 1918, the government replaced it with the tricolor — the blue, red, and green of Ali bay Huseynzade's call to "Turkify, Islamicize, Europeanize," flown by the Musavat Party since 1917. It lasted until the Soviet invasion of April 1920.

2. 1920

   The Soviet decades

   

   Under Soviet rule the tricolor was banned; the republic's final Soviet flag ran red over a blue band along the bottom, the hammer, sickle, and star in the canton. The banned flag lived on anyway: in 1952 the exiled ADR founder Mammad Amin Rasulzade sewed a copy in Turkey, a friend smuggled it into Azerbaijan and hung it on his house in Maştağa in 1976, and in 1956 the protester Jahid Hilaloghlu raised the tricolor over Baku's Maiden Tower.

3. 1990

   Nakhchivan first

   

   The tricolor returned to the streets in the late-1980s independence demonstrations — and returned to law from the edge inward: on November 17, 1990, the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic's assembly adopted the 1918 flag at its first session, and Baku followed on February 5, 1991, with slight changes to the colors and size. Independence came later that year.

4. 2013

   The colors, standardized

   

   The restored flag flew for two decades under the 2004 decree's color values. On October 22, 2013, the shades were standardized to Pantone — 306 C blue, Red 032 C, 362 C green, with RAL and CMYK fixed alongside — and the standard was ratified in 2018. The subtly different pre-2013 shades became a chapter of their own.

Who designed the Azerbaijani flag?

No single designer is on record. The color program is Ali bay Huseynzade’s — his "Turkify, Islamicize, Europeanize" gave the bands their meanings, and his followers in the Musavat Party flew the tricolor from 1917. The government of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic made it the state flag on November 9, 1918, carrying over the white crescent and eight-point star from the republic’s first, short-lived flag.

The flag’s most famous words belong to the republic’s founder, Mammad Amin Rasulzade: the flag once raised, he declared, will never fall — the rallying cry of Azerbaijani independence, and the promise the 1991 restoration kept.

Legal status and display rules

The flag’s description and ratio sit in Article 23.II of the constitution, and Law No. 683 of June 8, 2004, governs its use and display. The flag holds official status in the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic as well — fittingly, since Nakhchivan’s assembly restored it on November 17, 1990, three months before the rest of the country. Desecration is a crime: Article 324 of the Criminal Code punishes destruction, damage, or contemptuous markings with up to two years’ restriction of liberty or a year’s imprisonment.

State Flag Day is November 9 — the 1918 adoption date — a non-working holiday established by Law No. 595 of November 17, 2009; President Ilham Aliyev said the signing date itself honored Nakhchivan’s 1990 restoration. The National Flag Square in Baku opened on September 1, 2010, its 162 m (531 ft) pole flying a 70 × 35 m (230 × 115 ft), 350 kg (772 lb) flag — the world’s tallest unsupported flagpole until Dushanbe’s in 2011; the pole was dismantled in 2017.

Things you may not know

Nakhchivan restored it first. The autonomous republic’s assembly adopted the 1918 flag on November 17, 1990 — three months before Baku — and Flag Day’s founding law was deliberately signed on a November 17 in its honor.

A banned flag was smuggled home. The exiled founder Mammad Amin Rasulzade sewed a copy of the tricolor in Turkey in 1952; a friend carried it secretly into Soviet Azerbaijan and hung it on his house in Maştağa in 1976. It has hung in the National Museum of History since 2003.

The flag had the world’s tallest flagpole. Baku’s National Flag Square raised a 350 kg (772 lb) flag on a 162 m (531 ft) pole in 2010 — the tallest unsupported flagpole on Earth until Dushanbe’s overtook it in 2011.