The Flag With a Hole: How Hungary, Romania and East Germany Cut Communism Out of Their Flags

The most famous flag of the Hungarian Revolution has no emblem on it. It has a gap. Someone took scissors to the national tricolour in October 1956, cut out the communist coat of arms, and left a ragged hole where the state's crest used to sit.

That hole outlived the revolution that made it. Romanians copied it in 1989. East Germans did the same thing to their own flag that winter.

Why did a missing piece of cloth say more than any new design? The answer starts with why those emblems were on the flags in the first place.

Who put the crest there?

Before communism, none of these three flags needed a crest to make sense. Hungary had red, white and green. Romania had blue, yellow and red.

The communist regimes did not throw those colours away. They kept them and stamped their own badge in the middle.

• Hungary: when communist rule began in 1949, a new coat of arms with a red star went onto the flag as its badge. It is known as the Rákosi-era coat of arms.
• Romania: after the People's Republic was proclaimed on 30 December 1947, the royal arms were outlawed and a new crest full of industrial and farming imagery took their place on the yellow stripe.
• East Germany: the GDR flew a plain black, red and gold flag for its first decade. A law of 1 October 1959 added the hammer, compass and ring of rye. West Germans nicknamed it the Spalterflagge, the "splitter flag."

Notice the pattern. The colours belonged to the nation. The emblem belonged to the party. That split is what made the scissors work.

HungaryView flag →

Budapest, October 1956: scissors out

The Hungarian Revolution began on 23 October 1956, when university students in Budapest called on people to join them at the Parliament Building. Protesters cut the Rákosi arms out of the middle and flew what was left. Stuart A. Notholt, quoted on Flags of the World, notes that the hole ran past the white stripe and into the red and green.

Think about what that does. A new flag needs a designer, a committee and a sewing machine. A hole needs a pair of scissors. Anyone on the street was able to make one, and anyone who saw it understood the message without a caption. We keep Hungary. We drop the party.

Some revolutionaries used the crownless Kossuth arms instead, a shield Hungarians had reached for in revolutionary years since 1849. Flags of the World records a photo of a tricolour with that emblem at the toppled Stalin statue in October 1956.

The uprising did not last. Soviet forces moved to crush it on 4 November. The repression killed around 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet soldiers, and nearly a quarter of a million Hungarians fled the country.

The regime that kept the hole

The government installed by Moscow after November 1956 did not put the Rákosi crest back.

On 23 May 1957, Hungary enacted Act II of 1957, which amended the constitution. Its fourth section reads, in full: "A Magyar Népköztársaság zászlaja piros-fehér-zöld színű." The flag of the Hungarian People's Republic is red, white and green. The law gave the state a new coat of arms, with a red star above a shield, and its explanatory note dropped the rule that the arms had to appear on the flag.

So the new regime gave the revolutionaries the flag they had made, minus the hole. I read that as a quiet concession. Putting the Rákosi crest back would have reminded every Hungarian of the scissors.

The result has lasted a long time. Hungary's state flag has been a plain tricolour since 1957. When communism fell in 1989, the country needed no new flag at all, because the old one carried no communist insignia. Parliament reaffirmed it in Act XL of 1990 and moved on.

A hole above a coffin

The holed flag went quiet in Hungary for three decades. It came back for a funeral.

Imre Nagy, prime minister from 24 October to 4 November 1956, was executed on 16 June 1958. Exactly 31 years later, on 16 June 1989, Hungary reburied him. Around 200,000 people gathered in Budapest's Heroes' Square for the ceremony.

The artists László Rajk and Gábor Bachman designed the catafalque. Its centrepiece was a giant Hungarian tricolour with a hole in the middle, standing for the removed communist emblem and the 1956 revolution. The image now sits in the collection of the Open Society Archives in Budapest.

The choice made sense. The hole belonged to no party, and every person in that square knew what it meant. Six months later, holed flags turned up across the border.

Timișoara, 1989: Romania picks up the scissors

Romania's uprising started in the western city of Timișoara on 16 December 1989. Nicolae Ceaușescu ordered security forces to fire on the crowds. By 20 December, protesters in Timișoara were waving flags with the communist coat of arms cut out. Romanians called it drapelul cu gaură, the flag with the hole.

RomaniaView flag →

Events moved fast after that.

• On 21 December, a rally in Bucharest organised to support Ceaușescu turned into an anti-communist protest.
• On 22 December, Ceaușescu fled the Central Committee building by helicopter.
• On 25 December, he and his wife were executed by firing squad in Târgoviște.

The revolution cost 1,166 lives. One holed flag carried through Bucharest on 21 and 22 December, donated by a demonstrator named Antoniu Octavian Mureșanu, now belongs to the National History Museum of Romania.

Timișoara kept its own. The city's Memorial to the Revolution has a hall of flags from December 1989, and the majority have a hole where the emblem used to be. People handed most of them over between 1990 and 1994.

Romania's fix came even faster than Hungary's. On 27 December 1989, two days after the execution, the National Salvation Front restored the plain 1867 tricolour. Today Article 12 of the constitution defines the flag as three vertical stripes, blue, yellow and red, from the mast. No crest.

One piece of the communist flag did survive. The 2:3 proportion was first set by law under the socialist republic, and Law 75/1994 kept it, with the height at two thirds of the width. Until 2023, the law named its colours only as cobalt blue, chrome yellow and vermilion. A 2023 revision finally pinned them down in Pantone terms: 280c, 116c and 186c. The revolution cut out the emblem and left the geometry alone.

Berlin's quieter version

East Germany had holed flags too, though they rarely get mentioned alongside the Hungarian and Romanian ones.

After the Berlin Wall opened on 9 November 1989, people cut the GDR coat of arms out of their flags and carried the plain black, red and gold at demonstrations, according to Berlin's DDR Museum. Party emblems were vanishing from lapels and public spaces at the same time.

East GermanyView flag →

The German case has a twist. Cut the emblem out of an East German flag and you are left with plain black, red and gold, the same colours that would fly over a united Germany. So the hole rejected a party and pointed towards unity in one move.

The state followed the street. In June 1990, the freely elected People's Chamber voted to take the hammer, compass and wreath off the façade of the Palace of the Republic. At midnight on 3 October 1990, the flag of united Germany went up in front of the Reichstag, and the GDR's emblem went with the GDR.

GermanyView flag →

Why a hole outlives a new design

Each of these countries ended up with a clean flag. The hole itself never quite disappeared.

In Hungary, the Association of Political Prisoners, made up of people jailed after 1956, still flies the holed flag. Mária Wittner made a run of 56 remembrance flags, each with a hole and the Kossuth arms. Holed flags showed up again at anti-government demonstrations in Budapest in October 2006.

In Romania, holed flags still appear at mass protests, especially ones against government misconduct. The state has grown protective of its tricolour in the meantime. In June 2023, parliament amended Law 75/1994 to ban any inscriptions or symbols on the flag beyond those approved by law, and in November 2023 the Senate backed fines of 10,000 to 20,000 lei for breaking that rule.

Not everyone agrees on what the holed flag means now. Georges Kovari, writing on Flags of the World, draws a line between the ceremonial "flag of 56" and holed flags waved at modern protests. He admits the cloth is identical in both cases. As he puts it, "It is their use which implies their difference."

Kovari's distinction explains why the design worked. A hole has no designer, no committee and no official meaning. It refers only to what was taken away, and to the people who took it. You get your country's colours back, plus a visible record of what you removed. Hungary, Romania and East Germany each settled on a plain flag afterwards, but the version people remember from 1956 and 1989 is the one with something missing.