I saw a meme or three lately, showing a bright blue cloudless sky over a field of yellow oilseed sunflowers, with messages of support for the Ukrainians.
Is that where the flag choice originated?
I know Ukraine grows a metric shitload of sunflowers - that’s an official amount - for cooking oil, and is (was?) a big exporter. Did they select the flag colors based on this?
Looking at the Wikipedia article, it dates back quite a ways, but there doesn’t seem to be a formal symbolism.
I don’t know if it’s specifically sunflowers. It looks very familiar to me, because of the terrain similarities between Ukraine and Saskatchewan. Blue sky above, grain below, is what I assumed it is based on.
The sunflower is an official symbol of Ukraine, which makes it more plausible.
According to Wikipedia, the original symbolism of the colors was golden church domes over the blue Dnieper river (the yellow was originally on top), but that when it changed to blue on top in the mid-1800s, an explanation was circulated of sky over wheat or sunflowers. But that section of the article is packed full of (Citation Needed), so take it for what it’s worth.
Yet another way Ukraine resembles Kansas* - the Sunflower State
(*and Iowa, and parts of Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Minnesota)
Ukrainian farm scene
Easy to see where the design comes from.
No, it’s not. It’s easy to draw a conclusion on that, because it fits the narrative really well. But the OP is asking for a specific cite that would confirm this, not a WAG.
Yes, thank you. The memes are easy … I wanted to know if that’s the image from which the O.G. design was drawn.
Any yet, the blue-over-yellow flag has a decidedly top-heavy look to it, which it would not have if the yellow were on top and blue below.
Bicolor and tricolor European flags draw from heraldic traditions, which didn’t really rely on specific “meanings” of colors, but rather just on simple distinctiveness. Any meanings now understood are most likely created retroactively.
Since Ukraine has traditionally been called Europe’s Breadbasket due to the high grain production, I always assumed the yellow was the grain.
The blue and yellow colours apparently come from Lviv’s ancient coat of arms, and you’re right, the colours by themselves don’t dictate the flag design. The first flag proposed for Ukraine, during the 1848 revolutions, was gold over blue.
The current flag dates to 1918, when the colours were reversed: " to reflect ‘blue skies over golden wheat fields’.” So saith Whitney Smith, the father of modern vexillilogy, in the Britanica article: