Prepared for Czech Info Center by Radek Adamec.

This is what I have learned from various history books. I am not a historian, but I did my best, and believe this to be correct.

The original coat of arms used by the first Premyslid prince was a Flame Eagle (the Saint Wenceslas Eagle) derived from the eagle of the Holy Roman Empire. The first Premyslids, as imperial princes, also had the privilege of using a red standard. This followed from the obligations of the Czech sovereigns towards the imperial throne.

In the 1200's, as the power and prestige of the Premyslid kings grew, they adopted a more imposing symbol of a lion. It was placed on the original red standard. It had two tails to be a supernatural animal, a crown to express the sovereignty of the kingdom, and its white colour was once again derived from imperial symbolic. This royal coat of arms, also placed on a gothic shield, came to symbolize the land of Bohemia too, as well as the entire Czech state. Incidentally, the vacated Saint Wenceslas Eagle was adopted, and is still used, by some Italian city or region.

Sometime in the 1700's, national flags were created all over Europe in a fairly standardized way: the colours of the coat of arms were placed on a flag in stripes. So the Czech national flag was a white stripe over a red stripe.

In 1918, when Czechoslovakia was created, the flag turned out to be the same as Polish. The parliament decided to add a new colour to avoid confusion, and to express the new quality of the state with Slovakia included. The colour chosen was blue, because it appeared in the Moravian and Slovak coats of arms, and also the three colours would form the Slavic tricolora. A third stripe would have caused confusion with some other European flags, so a wedge was chosen as one of the oldest Czech heraldic figures. The coat of arms had a large, medium and small forms, the large one including all the Czechoslovak lands, such as Moravia, Silezia, Slovakia, Ruthenia...

After the split of Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic retained the flag, and formed a new large coat of arms containg the Czech lion, the Moravian eagle (chequered) and the Silezian eagle (black in gold). The shield is divided in four fields according to heraldic rules. The small coat of arms is only the lion.

The nice thing to say about Czech symbols is that they are very much historical and strictly heraldic, and that the Czech flag is among the few noble European flags whose white and red came from the colours of the Holy Roman Empire (together with Danish, Austrian and Swiss flags).