Latvia's Flag Began as One Line in a Medieval Chronicle
Julio Song · · 8 min read
Most national flags have a paper trail that starts with a committee. Latvia's starts with a poem.
Around 1279, a man the text calls a Brother came with a hundred men from Wenden, the castle town now called Cēsis, to Riga to defend the land. A German verse chronicle recorded what they carried: a red banner crossed by white. Seven centuries later, an independent Latvia took that line and made it law. Then it spent half a century on the wrong side of the criminal code.
Here is how a flag described in a few words of verse ended up with a legally defined shade of red, and how it came back after the Soviet years.
The banner in the verse
The source is the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, the Livländische Reimchronik, which covers events in the Baltic from 1180 to 1343.
The passage that matters describes a battle around 1279. FOTW quotes a translation by Ausma Regina Jaunzemils of Stanford University: the Brother and his men came from Wenden "with a red banner which was crossed by white, in the manner of the Wends."
That is the entire description. No coat of arms, no motto, no saint. A red cloth with white across it.
Folklore later filled the gaps. The Flag Institute gives the legend: the body of a Latvian clan leader was wrapped in a white sheet, and his blood stained it red at the edges. If that story sounds familiar, it should. Latvia's lawmakers in the 1920s ran into its twin.
A student goes looking
For six hundred years nobody treated the chronicle's banner as a national symbol. Latvia wasn't a state.
That changed in the late 1860s. According to FOTW's history page, a Latvian student at the University of Tartu, later known as Dr. Lautenbach-Jusmins, found the chronicle's reference to the banner. Through the 19th century, the Office of the President notes, patriotic individuals and organisations took up the colours.
During the First World War the flag started to look like a flag. In 1916, the pedagogue Jānis Lapiņš sketched a design and his pupil Marianna Strautmane sewed it. The latvia.eu history describes a red-white-red banner with a yellow sun. It now sits in the Cēsis History and Art Museum, in the same town the chronicle's fighters rode out of.
The version you see today came a year later. In May 1917, at a meeting of the Latvian Art Promotion Association, members accepted a design by the artist Ansis Cīrulis. Cīrulis was a trained professional. Born in 1883 in Majori, now part of Jūrmala, he studied at the Stiglitz school in Saint Petersburg and at the Académie Julian in Paris, according to the Lithuanian Universal Encyclopedia.
His flag had no sun. The sun went somewhere else. The Bank of Latvia says his 1917 proposal of land and a rising sun with broken rays became a basic element of the national coat of arms. One artist supplied both, and he kept the flag plain.
Why the red is not quite red
On 18 November 1918, Latvia proclaimed independence, and latvia.eu notes the red-white-red banner was already the agreed state symbol in the hall that day. On 15 June 1921, the Constitutional Assembly adopted the Law on the Flag and Coat of Arms of the Republic of Latvia, per the President's office.
Then came a practical headache. Austria also flew red-white-red horizontal stripes, and it had its own bloodstained legend.
Britannica tells the Austrian version. Duke Leopold V's tunic was drenched in blood after the Battle of Ptolemais (Acre) in 1191, except for the white area under his belt. Scholars dismiss the tale. The earliest known example of the Austrian arms is a seal of Duke Frederick II from 1230. So you have two flags, two wounded leaders and the same three stripes.
Latvia's answer was colour. In 1922, the President's office says, a government document described the flag's carmine red for the first time, "so that the flag could be more easily distinguished from the similarly coloured national flag of Austria." The Flag Institute calls carmine a deep red, "very slightly" purplish. Next to Austria's flag, Latvia's reads darker.
Proportion does some of the work too. The current Law on the National Flag of Latvia fixes the red-white-red stripe ratio at 2:1:2, so the white band is half as wide as each red one. The whole flag runs at a width to length ratio of 1:2.
The colour later got even tighter. According to the Wikipedia summary of the standards, the State Heraldic Commission chose Pantone 1807 C in 1995. Pantone 201 C replaced it in 2009. Rules from 1 May 2010 set Pantone 19-1629 TPX or TC for cloth, and since 1 January 2019 screens have their own standard of RGB 157, 34, 53. A dyed flag and a pixel flag each have a legal definition. That makes sense for a design whose identity rests on one shade of red.
Fifty years as contraband
The Soviet Union occupied Latvia in 1940, and the flag went from law to contraband. The President's office is blunt about it: after 1940, "the use or possession of this flag was considered punishable by law."
The occupiers supplied replacements. The first Latvian SSR flag, adopted on 25 August 1940, was red with a gold hammer and sickle and the letters LPSR. On 17 January 1953 it gave way to a red field with a hammer, sickle and outlined star above rippling water along the bottom. That design lasted until 1990.
Think about what the ban meant for anyone who still owned the old flag. A piece of cloth in a cupboard was evidence against you.
The roles have since reversed. Latvia has banned the display of the Latvian SSR flag at public events since 2013, the same Wikipedia article records.
Flowers at a monument, a flag on a tower
The flag's return was fast and public.
On 10 July 1986, three labourers in Liepāja, Linards Grantiņš, Raimonds Bitenieks and Mārtiņš Bariss, founded a human rights group called Helsinki-86. The Museum of the Occupation of Latvia tells what came next. On 14 June 1987 the group organised a flower-laying ceremony at the Freedom Monument in Riga for the people deported on 14 June 1941. The authorities tried to prevent it. It went ahead, and about 5,000 people joined a spontaneous rally that lasted two days.
The flag followed within a year and a half. FOTW dates its renewed use in Latvia to 1988 and its legalisation to 29 September 1988, while Latvia was still a Soviet republic.
Six weeks after that came the image people remember. On 11 November 1988, Lāčplēsis Day, the actor Ēvalds Valters and the writer Alberts Bels raised the national flag on the Holy Spirit Tower of Riga Castle. The Military Heritage Tourism record for the castle says thousands of people had gathered on the Daugava embankment below. A banner first recorded leaving one castle now flew from another, some seven centuries on.
On 27 February 1990, the flag's status as the national flag was restored, the President's office notes. The LSSR flag was officially replaced the same day.
A flag with a calendar
Latvia wrote the flag into law again on 29 October 2009. The Law on the National Flag does more than fix the stripes. It tells you when to fly it.
Section 7 lists the days when public buildings, organisations and homes must hoist the flag:
- 1 May and 4 May
- 21 August
- 11 November
- 18 November
Most of those dates map onto the story above. 18 November is the 1918 proclamation. 11 November is Lāčplēsis Day, when Valters and Bels climbed the tower. According to the Wikipedia history of the independence movement, 4 May 1990 is when the Supreme Council declared its intention to restore independence, and 21 August 1991 is when Latvia claimed it in fact.
The law also sets mourning days, when the flag flies with a black ribbon above it or at half-mast. One of them is 14 June, the anniversary of the 1941 deportations. It's the same date Helsinki-86 chose for the flowers in 1987.
What the chronicle got right
Most flags take their authority from a revolution or a monarch. Latvia's takes it from a medieval chronicle. That turned out to be useful. Nobody was able to dismiss the colours as a 19th-century invention, because a chronicler had written them down around 1279.
It also explains why Latvia cares so much about one shade of red. A flag defined by a single line of verse has no emblem to lean on. Take away the carmine and the 2:1:2 ratio, and you are looking at something close to Austria's flag. So the state named the red, wrote it into Pantone codes and gave it an RGB value.
The next time you see the Latvian and Austrian flags side by side, look at the red. The darker one is the flag Latvians risked prosecution to keep, and then raised over Riga Castle in 1988.
Julio Song
Writer
Julio is a staff writer at FlagDB. He studied Mathematics at the University of Madrid and has a passion for vexillology.
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