Flag of Bohemia
historic flag
The flag of Bohemia is a historic flag, which now forms part of the design in the modern flag of the Czech Republic. The flag, a horizontal bicolour, was based on the colours of the former monarchs of Bohemia.
The heraldic flag of Bohemia (the flag of Bohemia in the form of the flag with coat of arms) is described and drawn for example in the work of Jacob Koebel: Wapen des heyligen römischen Reichs teutscher Nation from 1545. The even older description of this flag (13th century) can be read in the chronicle of Ottokar aus der Gaal (Otacher ouz der Geul, Ottokar von Steiermark) (* about 1265; † between 1318 and 1322): Die Steirische Reimchronik.
History and use
"The colors of the flag, white and red, were derived from the coat of arms of the King of Bohemia (silver lion on a red field) which was granted to the king Vladislaus I in the 12th century. This quickly became the coat of arm of the whole kingdom."
The oldest surviving full colour depiction of the arms of Bohemia is represented by the fresco in the hall of the castle of Gozzoburg in Krems an der Donau, that comes from the early 1270s. A further depiction can be found in the manuscript of abbes Kunigunde from the 1310s.
The bicolor white-red banners were therefore carried into battle by the armies of the Bohemian kings and in the 19th century the colors were adopted by the Czech national movement. But when the goals of the movement were fulfilled in 1918 by the restoration of the independent Czech state, the need for the significant symbols, including a flag which was not identical to that of neighbouring Poland, led to the approval of the new flag of Czechoslovakia in 1920. This new flag still included the white and red horizontal stripes from the flag of Bohemia.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Flag of Bohemia” is historic flag. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Flag, Bohemia and historic, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “historic flag” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2549429. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1545, 1265, 1318 and 1322.
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This entry incorporates text from “Flag of Bohemia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.