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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

State Flag Day, November 9

November 9 — the anniversary of the 1918 adoption — is State Flag Day, a non-working public holiday established by Law No. 595, which President Ilham Aliyev signed on November 17, 2009. The signing date was itself a choice, he said: it honored the day in 1990 when Nakhchivan’s assembly restored the flag, three months before the rest of the country.

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 Criminal Code protects it. Azerbaijan has no citizens’ code of dos and don’ts; what the texts provide is tabled here.

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.