Poland Flag

Description

Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country located in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative subdivisions, covering an area of 312,696 square kilometres (120,733 sq mi), and has a largely temperate seasonal climate. With a population of nearly 38.5 million people, Poland is the sixth most populous member state of the European Union. Poland’s capital and largest metropolis is Warsaw. Other major cities include Kraków, Łódź, Wrocław, Poznań, Gdańsk, and Szczecin. Poland is bordered by the Baltic Sea, Lithuania, and Russia’s Kaliningrad Oblast to the north, Belarus and Ukraine to the east, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to the south, and Germany to the west.

The flag of Poland consists of two horizontal stripes of equal width, the upper one white and the lower one red. The two colours are defined in the Polish constitution as the national colours. A variant of the flag with the national coat of arms in the middle of the white stripe is legally reserved for official use abroad and at sea. White and red were officially adopted as national colours in 1831. They are of heraldic origin and derive from the tinctures (colours) of the coats of arms of the two constituent nations of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, i.e. the White Eagle of Poland and the Pursuer of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a white knight riding a white horse, both on a red shield. The national flag was officially adopted in 1919. Since 2004, Polish Flag Day is celebrated on 2 May. On the modern flag, white is said to represent the hope for peace by all of Poland’s people, while red represents the many struggles for freedom over the centuries. Horizontal bi-colours of white and red being a relatively widespread design, there are several flags that are similar but unrelated to the Polish one. There are two national flags with a red stripe above the white one: those of Indonesia and Monaco.