Flag of Hungary

• 1. Introduction

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  The flag of Hungary has a hole in its middle. During the anti-Soviet uprising of 1956, revolutionaries cut out the Communist Hammer and Wheat emblem and waved the resulting tricolour as the symbol of their rebellion. That act of removal distilled something essential about this flag: its power lies not in what has been added to it over the centuries, but in what remains when everything else is stripped away. What remains is red, white, and green in equal horizontal stripes. How those three colours came to carry the weight of a nation's history is a story spanning from medieval battle banners to Cold War street corners.

• 2. Medieval Roots

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  Early Hungarian warriors rode under red banners bearing the image of the Turul, a mythological bird tied to Hungary's origin legends. Over time, those military standards gave way to flags embroidered with Christian saints. King Saint Stephen of Hungary is recorded as having fought "under the banner of Saint George and Saint Martin." By the later medieval period, the red-and-silver-striped flag of the royal House of Arpad had grown prominent, carried alongside whatever dynastic colours the reigning house preferred.

  Since the 15th century, the red, white, and green combination began appearing more frequently, though not yet as a flag. It showed up on twisted silk cords used to seal official documents, and sometimes along the decorative edges of military banners. The colours had a connection to the historical Hungarian coat of arms, whose essential form had changed little since the mid-15th century. The arms themselves descended from those of the Arpad dynasty, Hungary's founding royal house, whose heraldic markings first appeared in the late 12th and early 13th century.

• 3. 1848 and the Tricolour

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  Act XXI of 1848 was the first law to formally mandate the red-white-green tricolour as a national symbol of Hungary. That legal act was the culmination of a broader freedom movement that had been building before 1848 and broke into open revolution that year. The revolution had two targets at once: the monarchy and the Habsburg Empire. The aim was an independent republic.

  The tricolour design drew deliberately on the flag of France, a conscious nod to the ideas of the French Revolution. Its stripes run horizontal rather than vertical, partly to avoid confusion with the Italian flag. This was a reasonable precaution, though the Hungarian banner in that horizontal form predated the adoption of the Italian tricolour by an Italian state by at least seven years. The colours were also already in use by 1790, when they appeared at the coronation of Leopold II, which itself predated the Cispadane Republic's tricolour of 1797.

  When the Habsburg Emperor crushed the Hungarian revolution, one of his first acts was to ban the tricolour outright. Hungarian volunteers who had fought alongside Giuseppe Garibaldi in the wars of Italian unification had carried the same flag. Its prohibition made it more potent, not less.

• 4. The Colours' Meanings

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  Romantic-era folklore gave each stripe a virtue: red for strength, white for faithfulness, green for hope. A parallel reading offered different symbolism altogether: red for the blood spilled for the fatherland, white for freedom, green for the land and pastures of Hungary. Both interpretations circulated for generations without either becoming official.

  The new Hungarian constitution, which took effect on the 1st of January 2012, resolved the ambiguity by codifying the first set: strength, fidelity, and hope. The semi-official English translation uses those exact words. The constitution did not settle questions about the flag's proportions, however. A law from 1957 specifies a 2:3 ratio for seagoing merchant vessels. A government decree from 2000 set a 1:2 ratio for flags flown on government buildings. The Hungarian Constitution itself says nothing about width-to-length proportions.

• 5. Badges, Bans, and Revolution

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  After the Compromise of 1867 restored Hungarian autonomy within the Habsburg structure, the tricolour became not only legal again but the official flag of Hungary. It then bore what is called the minor arms of Hungary, also known as the Kossuth coat of arms, flanked by archangels as supporters. That configuration held until the Habsburg Empire dissolved in 1918.

  The years between 1918 and 1920 were turbulent enough that minor changes to the badge are now difficult to trace. One clear exception interrupted everything: the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, which lasted four and a half months, replaced the tricolour entirely with a solid red banner.

  Communist rule from 1949 brought a new coat of arms featuring a red star onto the flag. That was the emblem the 1956 revolutionaries cut out. For a few months after the uprising began, the new government reverted to the minor arms without a crown as the badge. Then Soviet forces crushed the revolution. The government formed afterward created a new coat of arms but never officially placed it on the flag. Since 1957, Hungary's official flag has been a plain tricolour with no badge at all.

• 6. After Communism

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  When communism fell in 1989, Hungary faced no flag question. The plain tricolour carried no Communist insignia, which meant it needed no revision. Hungary stood alongside Poland and Czechoslovakia as one of only three socialist states in Europe whose flag had avoided incorporating socialist symbolism. That distinction, which resulted from the 1957 decision to leave the flag bare, turned out to matter enormously in 1989.

  In the 2000s, a Committee of Symbols recommended that the coat of arms be incorporated into the state flag while the national flag remained plain. That recommendation was never enacted into law. Under current legislation, the arms are legally permitted on the flag in most official state uses, and historical forms of both the arms and the flag may be used by private individuals declaring their national identity under the terms set by a 1995 law. The precise colour values of the flag's crimson red, white, and dark green were formally defined in Hungarian Standard MSZ 1361:2009, giving the stripes exact CIELAB, RGB, and hexadecimal specifications.