Thread:NhazUl/@comment-39523265-20190911140954/@comment-1189400-20190920185141

Thank you for your question! I've been doing quite some research on the topic for a while, so here's a wall of (con)text.

Like I said in the edit in which I removed this picture, this flag is based on conjecture. Here's why:

1) The person who originally made this flag claimed it was taken "from a coin of Tzar Constantine Tikh Asen". First, while red and gold were a popular combination of colors in medieval heraldry, especially on the Balkans where it was reserved for royals, you obviously can't guess colors from a coin.

2) Constantine Tikh is not known to have minted any coins depicting flags. The closest to it is a depiction of him holding a labarum (a ceremonial axe which could carry some decoration), but certainly no swallow-tailed flag. There is also a number of coins with a large Latin cross (one with four equally long arms). Not the Orthodox cross depicted on the flag.

3) A swallow-tailed banner is depicted on the coins of some rulers, but not Constantine Tikh. Those are later rulers, namely II Terter Georgi II Terter and his successor Michail III Shishman Asen. The flag in all cases is a swallow-tailed flag with a square field to the hoist, with a cross in it. However, those are imitations of the Venetian grosso, so it's possible the flag is not the one actually used by Bulgaria. The same flag also appears on Serbian denars from the same time which also started out as imitations of the grosso.

In conclusion, the flag with a golden cross on red has no real historical basis.

So why did I change it to what it currently is? Well, because it's a flag that appears on no less than 4 portolan charts from the end of the XIV/start of the XV century. Maps that are contemporary to the flag's existence, and on which it's depicted as... well, a flag. To list:

1325 - Angelino Dulcert/Dalorto/Dulcetti (top right)

1385 - Guillem Soler;

1423 - Mecia de Viladestes (Black Sea coast)

1426 - Battista Beccario;

Crops of Soler and Beccario.

The flag depicts the monogram (or at least initial) of the ruling Shishman dynasty (Ш) for Шишманъ, or in modern Bulgarian, Шишман (Shishman). The letter can carry various ornaments. In two of the maps, it's red on gold, in the other two it's red on silver. Similar emblems have been seen on coins of Michail Shishman and.

There are other maps from that time depicting flags above Bulgaria, some with red or golden paint, but they have sustained damage and the images on the flags are almost completely erased (such as the 1375 Catalan Atlas and a 1413 map by Mecia de Viladestes). Theearliest known one is from 1321, made by Pietro Vesconte. It features a flag with the letter N in red, on a field of white, above the city of Varna.

After 1426 (Bulgaria fell to the Ottomans in 1396 or, according to some historians, 1422, but we can imagine cartographers used information that was a bit obsolete), maps abruptly stop depicting any flags on what used to be the Bulgarian sea coast. The only ones remaining are the Golden Horde flag at the mouth of the Danube, the Byzantine/Paleologue/Genoese/Turkish one at Constantinople, the Byzantine one at Thessalonica and the Serbian one at Skopje. So the fact that the flag vanished so suddenly and rougly correlated with the time of Bulgaria's fall, I think it really is the true Bulgarian flag from that time. It's still possible, however, that it changed with every ruler.