After watching a documentary on the legacies of the Yugoslav Wars, I found out something really interesting about this little flag I bought last year in Santiago. Do you know what it is? If you don't, please keep on reading...
![Septiembre, tiempo de banderitas en #Chile. Me cuesta encontrar algunas que no tenga, pero aquí encontré un par: Paraguay y Croacia #flags]()
By the way, I also got the flag of Australia :)

As you may know, in September Chile celebrates our National Holiday, and that means street vendors appear selling flags and other Chilean memorabilia. My favourite are tiny flags to stick inside a car's windscreen. They are often sold in pairs, it can be two Chile flags, or a Chilean flag in combination with a flag with our Coat of Arms, your favourite football team, the Mapuche flag or maybe a foreign flag, mostly used to showcase your heritage.
Croatian descendants are not rare in Chile, but I just found the Croatian flag last year (on the left, a very simplified flag of Paraguay). Watching that documentary on the former Yugoslavia, I saw that they said the shield on the Croatia flag actually has a different meaning depending on the order of the checkered field.
![]() |
Flag of Croatia today. |
The current official Croatian flag's shield starts with a red square... but mine with a white square. That means this flag has the Ustaše shield, representing the fascist Independent State of Croatia! I'm convinced this wasn't done on purpose... it was surely just a mistake, or even more likely maybe, they Googled to look for images of a Croatian flag, and unknowingly chose one without the little shields on top of the big checkered one, that would have made it more difficult to produce. I wish I knew who makes these flags so to ask...
![]() |
Flag of Croatia under Fascism. |
And of course, I got to this conclusion from Google and Wikipedia (Flag of Croatia article here), I'm sure I could be wrong. If you know more, please leave a comment.