Last modified: 2014-06-28 by klaus-michael schneider
Keywords: thüringen |
Links: FOTW homepage |
search |
disclaimer and copyright |
write us |
mirrors
Thuringia is subdivided into 17 counties and 6 county-free
cities. All counties except for one have adopted flags. A clickable
map of Thuringia showing these subdivisions can be found at Ralf Hartemink's
International Civic
Arms website, made by me.
To draw the flags, I made use of the excellent pictures of the arms
at the heraldic
webpage of Thuringia. I changed the colouring to FOTW
standard, resized them and maybe edited a pixel or two, but essentially
they are still the same images. Moreover, Falko Schmidt reviewed
the images, corrected some mistakes and gave additional hints.
The composition of the coats of arms of the Thuringian counties are
exemplary for German counties in general. In most of them the symbols of
the (historical) states that ruled over (parts of) the county are shown
and combined with local symbols. With knowledge of these symbols just seeing
the arms usually gives you quite a good idea where the county is located.
The most common symbols in the Thuringian county arms are as follows (very
briefly):
The present counties were created by the Thuringian municipal reform
in 1994 which reduced their number from 35 to 17. The previous counties
were created in 1952 when the states in the German
Democratic Republic were abolished and replaced by districts (Bezirke).
Until 1990, the counties did not have their own symbols. Between 1990 and
1994, some of the old counties might have adopted flags, but I don't know
any of them.
Stefan Schwoon, 13 Mar 2001
Six out of the 16 counties with flags use the Thuringian
colours white-red while one uses red-white.
Stefan Schwoon, 16 Mar 2001
The flags I sent are based on the articles Ulle
1999 and Ulle 2000. In the meantime,
Jens Pattke has noted some differences between Ulle's articles and
a publication of the Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Thüringen
(LZT, Central institute for political education in Thuringia) available
online.
He published them on the Flaggenkunde mailing list (message #55
of 27 May 2001):
I compared the publication "Wappen und Flaggen des Freistaats Thüringen
und seiner Landkreise sowie kreisfreien Städte" von der Landeszentrale
für politische Bildung Thüringens (LZT), 2nd edition, with two articles
about Thüringen by H. Ulle in the Flaggenkurier. Inconsistent were:
I believe he wanted to send enquiries to the counties affected by the differences but I don't know if he got any answers.Landkreis Gotha: white-red banner (LZT) or red-white banner (Flaggenkurier)? Stadt Jena: blue-white-yellow banner (LZT) oder blue-yellow-white banner (Flaggenkurier)? Landkreis Nordhausen: yellow-red banner (LZT) oder red-yellow banner (Flaggenkurier)? Saale-Holzland-Kreis: green-white-red (1:2:1) horizontally striped banner (LZT) or green-white-red (1:2:1) vertically striped banner (Flaggenkurier)? Landkreis Sömmerda: the first designed flag in the Flaggenkurier was adopted 20.12.1999 (according to LZT).