The Rockville Flag by Temperance Blalock
Dec 15, 2009 12:25 - 4 Comments
I collect flag images from the Internet, and I recently ran across a site called 15 of the world’s strangest flags and at the top of that list was a flag that looks almost identical to our Rockville city flag. It’s the city flag for Fryslan/Friesland/Frisian, Netherlands. Their flag uses the red images to represent lilypads.
The Wikipedia article goes into some detail about the symbolism of all the components.
One of the best vexillology websites is “Flags of the World”, which has a short entry on the Rockville city flag. It describes the red parts here as “red cross bottony”. A cross bottony is a heraldic symbol, a cross with each side ending in three rounded lobes. This symbol also appears on the Maryland state flag, which in turn is based on the heraldic banner of the Calvert family.
I can’t get over how similar to each other the flags of Rockville and Friesland are: other than the lilypad/bottony difference, and the fact that Rockville’s blue bands are wavy but Friesland’s are not, they are strikilingly similar, including the shades of red and blue.
I wonder if it’s just coincidental?
Temperance Blalock
This is a contributor submission. Rockville Central encourages readers to submit pieces for consideration on all sorts of things — the more voices the better.
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Funny. I have friends in Friesland. Children of a friend and former housemate. My big question is this: why do you collect flag images from the Internet?
I like to take geography trivia quizzes on Facebook, and a lot of them are flag quizzes. I also have a screensaver on my computer that makes the image of a fluttering flag, so I collect flag images that are randomly rotated every minute, and it’s a constant flag quiz.
The Rockville/Friesland flag article is not only interesting, but educational. Thank you!
I think we found our next Sister City!