🇽🇰 The colours of Kosovo

Kosovo’s flag features a blue background with a gold map of the country and six white stars. Each star stands for one of Kosovo’s main ethnic groups, reflecting the country’s diversity. The colours and symbols were chosen to avoid favouring any single community and to mark a new national identity.

Where no official value is given, the swatch shows the colour family, not the exact shade.

• The flag was selected through an international design competition.
• Six white stars stand for Kosovo’s six main ethnic groups.
• The gold map shows Kosovo’s territory, a rare feature in national flags.
• Blue was chosen to avoid the main colours of neighbouring countries’ flags.
• The flag’s proportions are set at 1:1.4 by law.

The colours of the flag of Kosovo

The flag of Kosovo is made up of a blue field, a gold map showing the country’s outline, and six white stars arranged in a curve above the map. The official explanation is that each star represents one of the six main ethnic groups living in Kosovo. The gold map stands for the territory itself. The blue background does not have a stated meaning but was chosen to be distinct from the red and black of Albania and the red, blue and white of Serbia. The use of the map as a central design is unusual among national flags.

How the colours were chosen of Kosovo

Before independence, Kosovo did not have its own flag and used the UN flag during international administration. Different communities in Kosovo used the Albanian or Serbian flags, depending on their background. In the 1990s, Kosovar Albanians used a version of the Albanian flag with a red star, while Serbs used the Serbian tricolour. When a new flag was needed after independence, an international contest was held, and the winning design was chosen to avoid the colours and symbols of either Serbia or Albania. The flag was adopted in 2008.

Official shades and rules of Kosovo

The flag’s ratio was first set at 2:3 during the design contest, but a later law changed it to 1:1.4 (or 5:7). There are no officially defined shades for the colours, though some government documents list CMYK values. The flag’s use is regulated by Kosovo’s law on state symbols.