Adventures of a Wandering Mind: З днем прапора! Блог про сино-жовтий. Happy Flag Day! A blog about blue and yellow.

It's Flag Day in Ukraine! While in the US our Flag Day is usually just some words on a calendar, in Ukraine it's a fairly big deal. This morning out my window I could see a big assembly on the main square, flags everywhere. A parade of cars honking their horns and flying the flag followed a blue and yellow "Slava Ukraini!" van around the block. The national anthem rang out across city center.

I decided months ago that I wanted to write a blog about Ukraine's flag and national colors, but it turned out to be a more ambitious undertaking than I expected. In the end it worked out for the better, because taking my time meant I could finish the blog for Flag Day.

Ukraine may be the only place I have been where people are even more devoted to their flag and national colors than US Americans are. The simple motif of blue and yellow is ubiquitous; on the flag, of course, but also in signage, walls, advertisements, even graffiti. I'm convinced that anything that could possibly be made blue and yellow has, somewhere in Ukraine, been made blue and yellow.

The idea for this blog came to me as I was starting a rather long walk across town to my friend's place. I decided to photograph as many blue and yellow things as I could on my way, and almost as soon as I left my building, I had my first subjects: the yellow snack shop and blue shoe repair just outside my building, followed by blue and yellow poles that I assume are meant to keep people from driving into the grassy part of the yard.

By the time I crossed a street or two, I passed some blue and yellow gates, and blue and yellow construction walls.

Once I started looking for blue and yellow, I saw even more of it than I expected. Blue and yellow show up together in shop window displays, for example, and in advertisements.

Note the blue and yellow marshrutka reflected in the window of the blue and yellow shop display

Even the most utilitarian things, like waste bins, may as well be blue and yellow; while bus stops provide the chance to make something more elaborate.

I was on a roll with this idea for a blog about blue and yellow, but then I hit a block. I needed to know the right way and order in which to say the colors, in both Ukrainian and English. In the USA, you would never hear anybody say, "White, blue, and red" in reference to the US flag. It's always "red, white, and blue". And to complicate matters further, Ukraine has three words for the color "blue" - синий (syniy) indicating a darker or brighter blue, and блакитний (blakytniy) and голубий (holubiy) for a lighter or paler blue.

I googled a phrase I recalled having heard before, сино-жовтий (syno-zhovtiy, or blue-yellow), to see if it was correct, and in doing so came across another variation: жовто-блакитний (zhovto-blakytniy, or yellow-blue). Not only did the two names use different words for blue, but they were in a different order! I figured a quick poll of my Ukrainian friends would clear the matter up, so I posed the question on Facebook and ended up starting quite a back-and-forth in the comments. As it turns out, the apparently simple Ukrainian flag has a lot of complex history, and as with any symbol, discussions of its meaning and origin don't yield a clear consensus. If you start digging into Ukrainian-language resources, you can find a rather heated discussion in articles and opinion pieces in which some people claim that the Ukrainian flag has been flipped upside down (variously blaming Nazi sympathizers, communists, or simple mysteries of history for the reversal), while others respond with articles targeting "myths about the Ukrainian flag" and arguing that it is, in fact, as it should be.

After more internet research than I ever thought I would do about a simple, two-color national flag, here's what I've pieced together about it:

The colors

Many scholars trace Ukraine's national colors back to the kingdom of Galicia-Volhynia, which rose to prominence after the fall of Kyivan-Rus, the Slavic federation that reached its height in the 11th century and to which Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus all trace their origins. Galycia-Volhynia encompassed what is today northwestern Ukraine, as well as parts of Poland and Belarus, and included such Ukrainian cities as Lutsk and Lviv. Scholars often reference the golden lion and blue background of the flag of Galicia-Volynia when digging into the origins of Ukraine's current flag.

A variation of this flag was flown by Lviv's forces on the Polish-Lithuanian side of the historic Battle of Grunwald against Germanic Teutonic crusaders in 1410.

The golden lion on a blue background was still going strong in the 1800s when a wave of revolutions, the "Spring of Nations", swept across Europe in 1848 and people fought to replace monarchies with nation-states. Among the empires most affected was Hapsburg Austria-Hungary, which controlled Poland and western Ukraine. In 1848 Ukrainians under Hapsburg rule formed their own Supreme Council, which demanded that Ukrainian territories be united into one province and governed separately from Polish ones. They promoted the use of Ukrainian language in schools and local government, chose the the golden lion as their coat of arms, and determined that blue and yellow were the national colors of Ukraine. They did not, however, specify that they be organized or listed in a particular order. The collective "they" of the internet say that the blue-yellow combination became popular across both Austrian- and Russian-controlled Ukrainian lands over the following decades.

The Switch Story

One can find a handful of articles claiming that the Ukrainian flag was once yellow on top and blue on bottom, with various explanations of how it may have been switched.

Given the limited amount of research I have the time and energy to do for this blog, it seems to me that much of the confusion lies in the tumultuous time period between World War I and World War II. At the time of World War I, Ukraine's territory had been split for some time between the Russian Empire in the east and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the west. After World War I, both empires were falling and both saw independence movements rise up among Ukrainians ready to seize the opportunity. Ukrainian activists on both sides formed self-proclaimed autonomous Ukrainian states: the Ukrainian People's Republic in Russian-controlled territories, and the Western Ukrainian People's Republic in Austro-Hungarian controlled territories. Wikipedia (ever-so-reliable, I know) shows each of these self-proclaimed republics having a blue-yellow flag, but there's a commonly told story that at this time Ukrainians were actually flying a yellow-blue flag, and it was switched to blue-yellow under the not-super-popular hetman Павло Скоропадський (Pavlo Skoropadsky). One Ukrainian editorial writer claims that the first leader of the Ukrainian People's Republic, Mikhailo Hrushevsky, determined the flag would be yellow-blue, and highlights the usage of a yellow-blue flag by Ukrainian troops in World War I. This writer attributes the switch to a blue-yellow flag to the controversial activist Stepan Bandera, who used a blue-yellow flag in the movements he led for Ukrainian independence in the 1920s and 1930s. However, this same writer also tries to explain why the current blue-yellow flag is "wrong" by interpreting it via Chinese hexagrams, and seems to promote a narrative that ties Ukrainian nationalism to fascism, a common Russian trope. In other words, there are lots of stories floating around about this flag, and there's a whole Internet rabbit hole to go down. What seems to be most plausible is that, given there were multiple groups fighting for Ukrainian independence, that they had multiple variations of a similar flag. The handy graphic below shows its progression - including the switch.

Source: Ukrinform

Adoption of the current flag
The constitution of Ukraine now clearly lists the description of the flag using the phrase сино-жовтий, so сино-жовтий it is. The flag wasn't adopted immediately after independence in 1991, as Ukraine did already have a flag from its time as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. However, the flag that had long been flown by Ukrainian nationalists was finally officially adopted in 1992. It's easy to remember which color goes on top, because all you have to do is look at a field of wheat or sunflowers and see blue sky over yellow fields.

Now that we know more about Ukraine's flag and national colors, it's time to enjoy more of the ridiculous number of photos I have taken of blue and yellow things in Ukraine - and this isn't even half of them.