Posted by: Hugh Agnew. agnew@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Background of the state flag and coat of arms: The official coat of arms of the Czech Republic is
based on the arms of the lands of the Czech crown in the middle ages. The emblem of Bohemia
proper (once it had replaced the Premyslid "flaming eagle" still used in depiction of St. Vaclav) is a
white lion with two tails, rampant on a red field. The two eagles represent Moravia and Silesia. The
red-and-white chequerboard eagle on a blue field is Moravia, which was referred to by Emperor
Frederick Barbarossa as an independent Margraviate in the twelfth century, though it was soon tied
firmly to the lands of the Czech crown by the tradition of making the Czech king or his heir margrave.
The black eagle on the gold field represents Silesia. Only fragments of the historical territory of Silesia
remain in the Czech Republic today, around Opava and Tesin, but all of it came under the Czech
crown during the reign of John of Luxemburg and his son Charles IV.Many European national flags
derive from former royal coats of arms, and the Czech one is no exception. Since a complicated coat
of arms could not be seen from a distance during a conflict, the coat was reduced to a standard
displayed on a lance point, usually (following the customary descriptions of coats of arms) as bars of
horizontal colors. So, the Czech kings flew a standard of a bar of white "on" a bar of red, representing
the white lion on the red field. During discussions after World War I over what flag to adopt for the
new Czechoslovak State, in the end an adaptation of the Bohemian flag was created, with the addition
of a blue triangle next to the staff. This made the flag different from the flag of Bohemia alone
(recognizing the fact that not only Silesians and Moravians, but also Slovaks were now supposedly
part of the "state bearing" nation). The choice of blue meant that the colors of the flag were now
red-white-blue, which in the nineteenth century were considered "traditional Slavic" colors and had
been adopted by most pan-Slavic oriented movements (including the Czech Sokol movement) during
that time. Actually as far as I know there is no convincing evidence of their being particularly
"traditionally Slavic" before the Russians under Peter the Great began using a red-white-blue banner,
which probably came from the flag of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, whose shipbuilding
and naval prowess Peter greatly admired. Still, the idea was firmly fixed by the nineteenth century, so
the flags of Russia, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and ex-Yugoslavia all made
use of these colors for that reason. When the CSFR broke up in 1993, the Czech Republic by
decision of the Czech National Council, now the Czech Parliament, adopted a flag practically
undistinguishable from the flag of the Czechoslovak state, while the Slovaks adopted their "traditional"
flag, which is horizontal stripes of red-white-blue with the shield (appearing also in the Hungarian
emblem, but not in the red-white-blue colors) superimposed on it. The CSFR federal assembly had
agreed that neither "successor state" would use any symbols of the federation, but the CNR ignored
this resolution, which caused some further resentment among the Slovaks added to all their other
resentments, justified and unjustified...
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