Latvia

Ask what Latvia's flag means and you are usually handed a battlefield: a wounded chieftain laid on a captured white flag, the cloth soaking red around him while the white patch under his body kept its colour.

The trail behind that story is stranger than the story. Latvia's own National Encyclopaedia files the publications that revived it under pseudoscience. The man who printed it in a book in 1936 wrote in the same paragraph that it looked recently invented. And he had spread it himself, sixteen years earlier, to a troop of schoolboy scouts in Riga.

What Latvian law does fix is the colour, and it is not simply red. The statute calls the flag karmīnsarkans, carmine red, and a Cabinet regulation pins that to a Pantone number.

Key Takeaways

• The oldest evidence is a passage in the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle describing a red banner cut through with white, carried to Riga by an Order brother and a hundred men from Wenden, now Cēsis. The chronicler supplies neither a date nor an explanation.
• The bleeding-chieftain story was current in the 1920s. Kārlis Dzirkalis printed it in 1936 and wrote in the same breath that it looked recently invented. He had popularised it himself as a scoutmaster in 1920.
• Latvia's own state sources give a different reason for the dark shade. The President's Chancery says the carmine was first set down in a government document in 1922 so the flag could be told apart from Austria's.
• Article 4 of the constitution says of the flag only that it is red with a white stripe. Since 1998, changing that article requires a national referendum.
• Not one of the flag instruments published in Latvia's national law database assigns the red or the white a meaning. The 2009 flag law fixes the shade, a 2:1:2 band ratio and a 1:2 proportion, and never says what either colour stands for.

Why is the red on Latvia's flag so dark?

Because a statute says so, and because a Cabinet regulation gives it a number.

Article 2 of the Latvijas valsts karoga likums, the Law on the National Flag of Latvia, adopted by the Saeima on 29 October 2009, opens: "Latvijas valsts karogs ir karmīnsarkans ar baltu horizontālu svītru." The national flag of Latvia is carmine red with a white horizontal stripe. The next two clauses give the geometry: "Latvijas valsts karoga sarkanbaltsarkano svītru attiecība ir 2:1:2" and "Latvijas valsts karoga platuma un garuma attiecība ir 1:2". The red, white and red bands stand in a ratio of 2:1:2, and the flag's width to its length is 1:2.

What article 2 does not do is put a number on the carmine. That job is delegated. Article 22 of the same law, in the text now in force, tells the Cabinet of Ministers to set "Latvijas valsts karoga auduma krāsu toņu kodus", the colour tone codes of the flag's cloth, along with its thickness, surface density and colourfastness.

The Cabinet did that in Regulation No. 405 of 27 April 2010. Clause 18.1, in the text now in force, requires that "karmīnsarkanā auduma krāsa atbilst Pantone Textile Colour System 19-1629 TPX vai 19-1629 TC krāsas kodam". Clause 20 handles print rather than cloth, carries no amendment note, and gives a different pair of codes: "karmīnsarkanais Pantone 201C, baltais Pantone White".

So there are two official carmines, one for fabric and one for ink, and neither of them lives in the flag law itself.

The oldest evidence is a banner in the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle

The earliest attestation of the design is a passage in the Livländische Reimchronik, the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, an anonymous Middle High German verse account.

In the standard edition prepared by Leo Meyer in 1876, the passage is at lines 9219 to 9233. A brother and a good hundred men come from Wenden to Riga for the land defence, and they arrive "mit einer banier rôt gevar", with a banner red in colour, "daȥ was mit wîȥe durch gesniten", which was cut through with white. Meyer's own glossary translates durch gesniten as durchtheilt, eingetheilt, divided through. The chronicler then names the place: Wenden is a castle, and it lies "in Letten lant", in the land of the Letts. He closes the thought flatly: "die banier der Letten ist", the banner is the Letts'.

Wenden is the German name for Cēsis, in northern Latvia. Latvia's National Encyclopaedia, whose flag entry is written by Tālis Pumpuriņš, reads that brother as a brother of the German Order arriving from Cēsis with a hundred Lettish land defenders, and calls this the only banner of the peoples then living in Latvian territory that the thirteenth-century record describes by colour.

The passage does not date itself. Because the chronicler never says when this happened, the encyclopaedia reports that researchers propose 1279 or 1280 rather than settling on a year. Nor does he attach any meaning to the red or the white.

Was the chieftain's blood a real story?

No, in the sense that matters: it cannot be traced back beyond the twentieth century, and the man who printed it in 1936 said so himself.

The tale appears in Latvijas karoga vēsture, a 1936 book by the architect and public figure Kārlis Dzirkalis. Pumpuriņš quotes two of Dzirkalis's stories at length in a footnote to his 2003 doctoral dissertation.

The one Dzirkalis prints first is about a castle's kokle player who dips half his white shirt in the blood of a sacrificed ram and finds the middle still white where his hand had gripped it. Dzirkalis says a Teodors Krasovskis retold that version to the poet Rainis at Dunava in 1910.

The one Dzirkalis prints second, introduced with "Ir cits nostāsts", there is another tale, is the famous one. Latvians fighting invading knights capture the enemy's white flag; their chieftain is wounded in the same battle and is laid on it; he makes them swear to fight on; and when he dies and is lifted off, the flag is entirely red apart from a white patch where his body had lain.

It is that second story Dzirkalis then judges. "Šis nostāsts liekas gan radies pēdējā laikā," he wrote, this tale seems to have arisen recently, "jo mūsu dainās, pasakās un teikās nav ne mazāko norādījumu par šīs leģendas izcelšanos vai vecumu", because our folk songs, fairy tales and legends contain not the slightest indication of this legend's origin or age. Nor, he added, was it conceivable that so detailed and dramatic a retelling had survived from the thirteenth century. His own guess was that a zealous history researcher had overreached, "jo kad latvju sabiedrība sāka interesēties par latviešu karoga izcelšanos, tad vajadzēja sniegt kādu izskaidrojumu par latviešu karogu", because once Latvian society began taking an interest in where its flag came from, some explanation had to be supplied.

Pumpuriņš then adds the detail that makes the footnote worth reading twice: "Interesanti atzīmēt, ka otro nostāstu 1920. gadā, būdams skautmasters, popularizējis pats K. Dzirkalis." The chieftain story, the second of the two as Pumpuriņš prints them, was popularised in 1920 by Dzirkalis himself, when he was a scoutmaster. The evidence cited is a letter of 18 August 1997 from a man born in 1907, who was then a third-year pupil at Riga's 12th primary school and a scout in the 1st troop.

Austria has a legend of the same shape

Pumpuriņš records one more pointer, and it explains the shape of the tale rather than merely dating it. The scientist and historian of science Jānis Stradiņš, in his book Trešā atmoda, "norādījis uz šī nostāsta līdzību ar vienu no senākajiem Austrijas sarkan-balt-sarkanā karoga izcelsmes skaidrojumiem", pointed out the tale's similarity to one of the oldest explanations of the origin of Austria's red-white-red flag.

Austria's flag has the same three bands in the same order, and the Austrian legend has the same shape. A magazine published by Austria's own Interior Ministry sets it out and then disowns it in the same sentence. The story of how Duke Leopold V came to choose the red-white-red arms is, it says, "Historisch nicht belegbar", historically unverifiable: the duke, "dessen weißer Waffenrock nach dem Kampf bei Akkon bis auf einen durch die Schwertbinde bedeckten Streifen von Blut rot getränkt gewesen sein soll", whose white surcoat after the fighting at Acre is said to have been soaked red with blood except for a stripe covered by his sword belt.

The same plot, then, attached to two flags, and disowned in both countries by their own state publications. Latvia's National Encyclopaedia treats the story's revival in the same terms. Describing the nationwide public discussion of Latvian symbolism convened in 1988 under Stradiņš, it says that alongside the debate there appeared "pseidozinātniskas publikācijas gan par latviešu karoga slāvisko izcelsmi, gan uz sveštautu leģendām balstīto nostāstu par noasiņojošo kareivi uz baltā auduma": pseudoscientific publications, both about a Slavic origin for the Latvian flag and about the tale, based on foreign peoples' legends, of the bleeding warrior on the white cloth.

That is a state encyclopaedia calling the popular explanation of its own national flag borrowed, in the entry a reader looking up the flag will find.

Why Latvia went looking for a darker red

The competing account is duller and better documented, and it comes from the President of Latvia's own website.

Its page on the national symbols reproduces the flag law's description, adds nothing about blood, and says this about the shade: "Valdības dokumentā pirmoreiz karoga īpašā sarkanā (karmīna) krāsa raksturota 1922. gadā, lai karogu varētu vieglāk atšķirt no līdzīgā krāsu salikumā esošā Austrijas valsts karoga." The flag's particular red, the carmine, was first described in a government document in 1922, so that the flag could more easily be told apart from the Austrian state flag, which has a similar colour combination.

Austria appears in both accounts, then, but doing opposite work. In the legend it is the unacknowledged donor of the plot. In the state's account it is the reason Latvia went looking for a darker red in the first place.

A resource published by the Latvian Language Agency dates that 1922 document precisely. The law of 15 June 1921 had set the colour proportions, it notes, "bet sarkanās krāsas tonis vēl palika neprecizēts", but the shade of the red was still left unspecified. Cabinet regulations signed by Zigfrīds Anna Meierovics and published on 25 August 1922 kept the 2:1:2 ratio "un pirmoreiz noteica sarkanās krāsas toni (karmin)", and for the first time fixed the shade of the red, carmine.

What Latvia's constitution and flag law fix

Latvia's constitution, the Satversme, was adopted by the Constitutional Assembly on 15 February 1922. In its original text, article 4 was one sentence and it was about the flag: "Latvijas valsts karogs ir sarkans ar baltu svītru." The national flag of Latvia is red with a white stripe.

That article was rewritten on 15 October 1998 to add the state language. It now reads "Valsts valoda Latvijas Republikā ir latviešu valoda. Latvijas karogs ir sarkans ar baltu svītru." The same amendment rewrote article 77, which had required a referendum to change articles 1, 2, 3 or 6, so that it now covers "pirmo, otro, trešo, ceturto, sesto vai septiņdesmit septīto pantu" as well. Latvia's flag clause became referendum-protected in 1998, seventy-six years after it was written.

Read together, the two instruments say a great deal about the flag's shape and nothing about its significance. The constitution says red and white. The flag law says carmine, 2:1:2, 1:2, and that "Latvijas valsts karogs ir Latvijas valsts simbols", the flag is a symbol of the Latvian state. It regulates mourning ribbons, pennants and which days a flag must be flown, it hands flagpole finishes to the Cabinet, and it requires Estonia's flag beside Latvia's at the presidential residence, the Saeima and the Cabinet building on 24 February, with Lithuania's there on 16 February. Nowhere does it say what the red is or what the white is.

The same holds for every flag instrument in Latvia's national law database, read end to end: the 1990 rules, the 1994 law and the 2010 regulations all specify and none interpret. One gap is worth declaring, because that database does not carry the pre-war instruments. The 1921 law, the 1922 Cabinet regulations and the 1923 flag system law were not read here, and every statement about them in this article rests on the state sources that describe them.

Instrument	Date	What it fixes about the flag
Satversme, art. 4 (original)	15 February 1922	Red with a white stripe
Cabinet regulations, Meierovics	25 August 1922	The shade, carmine, for the first time
Satversme, arts 4 and 77 (amended)	15 October 1998	Adds the state language, and makes art. 4 referendum-protected
Law on the National Flag of Latvia, art. 2	29 October 2009	Carmine red, 2:1:2 bands, 1:2 proportion
Cabinet Regulation No. 405, cls 18.1 and 20	27 April 2010	Pantone 19-1629 TPX or TC for cloth, Pantone 201C for print

The carmine gets a Pantone number

For most of the flag's modern life, the shade was a recommendation rather than a rule, and it showed.

An article published on the official publisher's portal in August 2008 by Sintija Stipre, then second secretary of the State Protocol at the Foreign Ministry, put the problem plainly. Latvia's flag, she wrote, stands out for a red tone "kas latviski tiek dēvēts par karmīnu, bet starptautiski par Latvian Red", called carmine in Latvian and Latvian Red internationally. The trouble was that in practice "sarkanās krāsas tonis variē no tumši brūna līdz pat spilgti sarkanam", the shade of red varied from dark brown all the way to bright red.

Her diagnosis was that the shade had been defined in the wrong place. Under the law then in force the red was carmine, and the State Heraldry Commission had defined it on the Pantone scale as PANTONE 1807C. But the commission's decisions, she noted, have no legally binding force, and a print scale is the wrong tool for dyeing wool, silk or polyamide. Her proposed remedy was to write the technical parameters of the carmine into a legal act, as she put it "līdzīgi kā tas ir izdarīts Igaunijas Republikas likumā", the way Estonia had already done it in its own flag act.

The National Encyclopaedia credits her with drafting that bill and the 2010 regulations, and the Foreign Ministry's explanatory note to the bill says the same thing in the ministry's voice: the Heraldry Commission's carmine tone "ir piemērojams tikai poligrāfijas darbiem", is applicable only to printing work, and the commission's decisions have "tikai rekomendējošs raksturs", only a recommendatory character.

That is exactly what happened next. The 2009 law delegated the codes, and Regulation No. 405 supplied them the following April, with separate values for cloth and for ink, and a different red from the one the commission had recommended. If you have ever wondered why one country's flag needs two Pantone numbers, that is the reason, and it is worth remembering next time you are asked to pick a flag out of a line-up.

The ban, and the instruments that undid it

The flag was outlawed under Soviet occupation. The National Encyclopaedia says the occupation authorities tolerated it briefly for propaganda and then banned it, and records that publicising or even storing the colours risked reprisals. The President's Chancery dates criminal liability for using or keeping the flag from the 1940 occupation.

The Latvian Language Agency's resource dates the ban itself from 1944 rather than 1940, and records that several hundred Latvians were imprisoned in Siberia for using the flag.

Its return was gradual, and each step had an instrument behind it. A decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Latvian SSR of 29 September 1988 approved the red-white-red combination as a cultural and historical symbol of the Latvian people, after a public consultation. Six weeks later, on 11 November 1988, the flag was raised over the Holy Spirit tower of Riga Castle.

On 15 February 1990 the Supreme Council passed a law approving rules whose first clause reads: "Valsts karogs ir karmīnsarkans ar garenvirziena baltu svītru vidū." The state flag is carmine red with a lengthwise white stripe in the middle. The law was still headed as a law of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, and it took effect on 4 March 1990. The President's Chancery dates the restoration of the flag's status to 27 February 1990, a date no instrument in the national law database matches. An amending law of 16 January 1991, passed during the barricades, struck the Soviet designation out of its title.

A Saeima law of 24 November 1994 replaced it, and quietly demoted the carmine. Its article 1 says only "sarkans", red, and the shade survives as a parenthesis in that law's article 4, "(karmīns)". The 2009 statute repealed that law and put the carmine back into the opening description, where it had been in 1990.

Frequently asked questions

What do the colours on the Latvian flag mean?

No Latvian flag instrument in force assigns them a meaning. Article 4 of the constitution says the flag is red with a white stripe; article 2 of the 2009 Law on the National Flag of Latvia says it is carmine red with a white horizontal stripe, in bands of 2:1:2, and that the flag is a symbol of the Latvian state. Neither text goes on to say what the colours mean, and neither does Cabinet Regulation No. 405, whose colour codes and cloth specifications say what the flag must be made of and nothing about what it stands for.

Readings do circulate. An explanatory piece published on the state publisher's portal in 2011 offers the white stripe as the river Daugava and the red as the blood of those who fell for freedom, but the piece cites no instrument for it, and it carries the portal's own notice that the article is more than a decade old.

How old is the Latvian flag?

The design is attested once in the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, in an episode conventionally placed in 1279 or 1280, though some researchers of medieval Livonia now date the chronicle's writing to the early fourteenth century. It was used at the proclamation of the Republic on 18 November 1918 and made the state flag by a law of 15 June 1921, then banned under Soviet occupation before a law of 15 February 1990 restored it, initially as the flag of the Latvian SSR.

The chronicle passage describes a red banner cut through with white carried by a hundred men from Wenden, now Cēsis. It carries no year of its own, and Latvia's National Encyclopaedia notes that the researchers who move the chronicle later also read that banner as the flag of the knights of Cēsis castle rather than of a Latvian people.

The National Encyclopaedia's own account then jumps to the early 1870s, and what it describes there is a revival rather than a survival: Latvian students and writers took the chronicle's colours up as national colours, which is a different thing from unbroken use.

What exact colour is the Latvian flag?

It depends on the material, and Latvia has an official value for each. Cabinet Regulation No. 405 of 27 April 2010, in the text now in force, requires flag cloth to match Pantone Textile Colour System 19-1629 TPX or 19-1629 TC, and requires printed reproductions to use Pantone 201C with Pantone White.

The rest of clause 18 specifies the cloth: a surface density of at least 110 g per square metre, a thickness of at least 0.29 mm, colourfastness of at least class four to rubbing and class six to light, an opacity coefficient of at least 60 per cent, and cloth that resists flame for longer than ten seconds before it catches.

Who designed the Latvian flag?

Latvian state sources answer this two ways, and the difference is worth knowing. The same 2011 piece on the state publisher's portal, the one that cites no instrument for its colour reading, says flatly that the artist Ansis Cīrulis developed the design in May 1917. The President's Chancery puts it differently: discussion, it says, left the Cīrulis design the most popular. The National Encyclopaedia describes a May 1917 board meeting at which four designs were tabled, three of them in the 2:1:2 proportions the flag now has.

That board was the Latvian Art Promotion Society's, meeting in Riga. The artists Cīrulis and Valdemārs Tone and the photographer Jānis Rieksts each put forward designs with a 2:1:2 band ratio, against Oļģerds Grosvalds's 1:1:1, and the meeting agreed the white stripe would be one fifth of the flag's width. The Cīrulis proposal spread after Rieksts reproduced it on postcards at the start of December 1918.

When did Latvia adopt its flag by law?

Latvia adopted its flag by law on 15 June 1921, when the Constitutional Assembly passed a law on the flag and coat of arms of the Republic of Latvia. Its rapporteur, Marģers Skujenieks, tied the design to the thirteenth-century Cēsis banner as its ideological prototype.

Earlier documents exist but are narrower: an Interior Ministry circular of 19 December 1918 treated red-white-red as the state colours, and Interior Minister Miķelis Valters signed an order on the flag's use in Liepāja on 3 March 1919. The system of state, merchant, official and naval flags was completed by a law promulgated by President Jānis Čakste on 20 January 1923.

Sources

• Latvijas valsts karoga likums, Law on the National Flag of Latvia, adopted 29 October 2009, consolidated text published by Latvijas Vēstnesis at Likumi.lv. Articles 2, 8 and 22. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Latvijas Republikas Satversme, Constitution of the Republic of Latvia, adopted 15 February 1922, current text and the original 7 November 1922 text at Likumi.lv. Articles 4 and 77. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Grozījumi Latvijas Republikas Satversmē, constitutional amendment of 15 October 1998, at Likumi.lv. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Ministru kabineta noteikumi Nr. 405, Cabinet Regulation No. 405 of 27 April 2010 on the application of the Law on the National Flag of Latvia, consolidated text at Likumi.lv. Clauses 18.1 and 20. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Par Latvijas valsts karogu, Saeima law of 24 November 1994, repealed in 2009, at Likumi.lv. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Par Latvijas Republikas valsts karogu, law of 15 February 1990 and its annexed rules, as amended on 16 January 1991, at Likumi.lv. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Valsts simboli, national symbols, Chancery of the President of Latvia. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Tālis Pumpuriņš, Latvijas valsts karogs, Nacionālā enciklopēdija, the National Encyclopaedia published by the National Library of Latvia, entry updated 19 December 2025. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Tālis Pumpuriņš, Latvijas valsts karoga veidošanās vēsture (XIX gs. 70. gadi - 1923. gads), doctoral dissertation, Cēsis, 2003, University of Latvia digital repository. Chapter 1 and footnote 61, pages 30 and 52 to 53, the latter quoting Kārlis Dzirkalis, Latvijas karoga vēsture, Grāmatu draugs, Rīga, 1936. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Leo Meyer, ed., Livländische Reimchronik, Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn, 1876, lines 9219 to 9233 at page 211, with the editor's glossary and name index. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Sintija Stipre, Latvijas valsts karoga tiesiskā regulējuma problemātika, LV portāls, published by Latvijas Vēstnesis, 18 August 2008. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Latvijas valsts karoga lietošana, LV portāls, published by Latvijas Vēstnesis, 2011. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Latvijas valsts karoga likums, likumprojekta anotācija, explanatory note to the bill, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ninth Saeima. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Karogs, thematic resource of Latviešu valodas aģentūra, the Latvian Language Agency, quoting Gailiša 1998, pages 67 to 77. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Wappen und Flaggen, Öffentliche Sicherheit 11-12/06, the magazine of the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior, on the Babenberg arms and the Leopold V legend. Retrieved 27 August 2026.