How a country's flag changed

Pick a country and step through the flags it has flown, with what changed at each point and the political reason behind it. 32 countries covered, 114 flags in total — chosen because their flag histories are genuinely documented rather than to pad a number.

Country

9 documented changes — tap to step through

Kingdom of Afghanistan tricolor

1930–1973

Vertical bands of black, red, and green, with a central emblem featuring a mosque, a pulpit, and sheaves of wheat.

What changed

Restored a black-red-green tricolor concept after a turbulent 1929, in which a brief usurper government had interrupted Afghan royal rule.

Why

Mohammed Nadir Shah, who took the throne in 1929 after suppressing the Kalakani uprising, adopted this design to restore a stable royal flag along lines earlier explored during King Amanullah's modernizing reforms of the 1920s, and it remained largely unchanged through more than four decades of his and his son Zahir Shah's rule.

Colours: black, red, green

Full Afghanistan flag page →

Coverage for Afghanistan: Afghanistan has changed its national flag more often than any other country in the modern era; this timeline covers the well-documented sequence from 1930 onward and deliberately omits the more inconsistently sourced flags used between 1901 and 1929, including the brief 1929 usurper government, rather than guess at their exact designs.

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How to read this timeline

Each step is a flag a country actually flew, with the years it was in use, a description of what it looked like, what changed from the flag before it, and why. The “why” is the part worth reading: flags almost never change for aesthetic reasons. They change when the state does — a monarchy falls, a colony becomes independent, a union dissolves, a government wants to signal a break with the one before it. Read down a country's timeline and you are reading a compressed political history.

Why only the current flag is shown as an image

This site holds accurate vector artwork for flags currently in use. It does not hold verified artwork for every historical flag, and showing an approximation would be worse than showing none — a reader would reasonably assume the picture is accurate. Historical entries are therefore described in words, precisely enough to recognise the design, and the current flag is the one rendered.

“Traditional date” means the date is not documented

Some of the most repeated dates in vexillology are traditional rather than recorded. Denmark's Dannebrog is conventionally dated to 1219 on the strength of a legend, and Denmark's own flag authorities are candid that the evidence does not establish it. Where an entry rests on tradition it is labelled, rather than presented with the same confidence as a flag whose adoption is in the statute book. A reference site that flattens that distinction is quietly unreliable, and the distinction is usually the interesting part.

Coverage is deliberately partial

Most countries are not here, and that is on purpose. A great many national flags have never meaningfully changed, so a timeline for them would be a single entry; and for some countries the record is too thin or too contested to summarise honestly in a few lines. Generating an entry anyway to make the coverage look complete would mean inventing history, which is the one thing a reference site cannot do. Each country carries its own coverage note stating what its timeline does and does not include.

If the country you want is missing, its flag page still covers adoption dates and any redesigns in prose, and the guide to flags that changed after independence covers that pattern across regions. To identify a flag you have seen rather than trace one you can name, use the flag identifier; to hold two designs against each other, the comparison tool lists what they share and where they differ.