Flags of Europe Quiz

Five crosses, one rule

Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Finland all fly the Nordic cross, and in every one of them the upright sits nearer the hoist than the fly. Denmark’s red-and-white Dannebrog – legend dates it to 1219 – is commonly cited as the oldest national flag still in use. The rest are colour keys: Sweden gold on blue, Finland blue on white, and Norway and Iceland are each other’s inverses – Norway a blue cross edged in white on red, Iceland a red cross edged in white on blue. Miss one of that pair and the end-of-round review will show you which inversion you got backwards.

Tricolour country

The white, blue and red thirds running through Slavic Europe were adopted as shared colours at the Prague congress of 1848, on the model of Russia’s tricolour; Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia and Croatia wear them with small variations, which is exactly why several add arms to stay distinct. The Netherlands flies the oldest tricolour of all, and France turned the stripes upright in the 1790s – the arrangement Ireland and Italy later took up in their own colours. When two horizontal tricolours share their colours in a different order, say the order aloud: Bulgaria’s white-green-red is not Hungary’s red-white-green.

The rule-breakers

Three designs in this flags of Europe quiz ignore the grammar entirely. The United Kingdom overlays the crosses of St George, St Andrew and St Patrick into a design nobody confuses with anything else. Switzerland flies one of the world’s two square national flags, and it stays square on this page rather than being stretched to fit the plate. And Latvia is the shade trap: maroon darker than any ordinary red around a white band half the width of the others is what separates it from Austria’s three equal stripes. If the red looks like dried wine rather than a postbox, you are in Riga.