Flagging interest

"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum"

Arthur C. Clarke

Greetings, fellow earthlings! The image above is a design for the Flag of the Earth, created by James W. Cadle in 1970, in the wake of the first Apollo moon landing. It features a stylised section of the sun's disc, a blue circle representing the earth and a smaller white circle for the moon. It's an interesting alternative to the other coloured scraps of cloth that humans are always squabbling over and deserves another showing, with the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 coming up.

I started looking at flag-related trivia after reading Flags of Forgotten Countries at Dark Roasted Blend (an article from which I pinched the Arthur C Clarke quote above). Among many other factoids, I discovered the origin of the two-headed eagle that became a symbol of Russia under the Tsars (and has been rehabilitated by the nationalists in the present Russian Federation). I'd always thought that this mutant bird looked a bit odd, but didn't know why it had two heads. The reason, apparently, is that the bird was first used on a Byzantine standard. It was a version of the Roman Eagle, the two heads, symbolising the fact that the Byzantine Empire looked both west to Europe and east to Asia. Here's a version of one of the the original Byzantine double-headed eagles, the emblem of the Palaiologos dynasty:


After the fall of Constantinople, Byzantine refugees ended up in Moscow, where their Imperial symbol was adopted by their Russian Orthodox coreligionists. At various times, this funny-looking bird has also been adopted as a national symbol by Albania, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, Montenegro, Serbia and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, among others.