Flags of Azerbaijan

Republic of Azerbaijan (modern)

Who & why: Azerbaijan declares independence on 18 October 1991 as the Soviet Union dissolves. The republic fights a war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mostly Armenian-populated enclave inside its Soviet-era borders, losing effective control of it after a 1994 ceasefire; Azerbaijan retakes the territory in a 2020 war and a further 2023 offensive, ending nearly three decades of de facto Armenian-backed separation.

What it represents: the blue-red-green tricolor with a white crescent and eight-pointed star is readopted from the 1918 Democratic Republic's own flag, officially explained as blue for Turkic heritage, red for progress and modernity, and green for Islam, with the crescent and star further symbolizing Islam and the eight branches of the Turkic peoples.

Soviet Azerbaijan

Who & why: the 11th Red Army marches into Baku in April 1920, ending the Democratic Republic with barely a fight. Azerbaijan is folded into the Transcaucasian SFSR alongside Georgia and Armenia from December 1922 until the 1936 "Stalin Constitution" splits it out as its own Azerbaijan SSR. Baku's oil fields make the republic an industrial priority for Moscow throughout the Soviet period, and Nagorno-Karabakh is established as an autonomous oblast inside the republic's borders in 1923, a decision whose consequences outlast the Soviet Union itself.

What it represents: the standard Soviet red banner with gold hammer and sickle, distinguished by a horizontal light-blue stripe near the bottom edge, a version adopted in 1952 and flown until the USSR's collapse.

Azerbaijan Democratic Republic

Who & why: declared on 28 May 1918 after a short-lived Transcaucasian federation collapses, the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic is the first secular, democratic, parliamentary republic ever established anywhere in the Muslim world. Its parliament extends the vote to women that same year, ahead of many European states including, notably, the United Kingdom and the United States. The republic is poor and embattled, fighting border conflicts with Armenia, before the Red Army takes Baku in April 1920 with little resistance.

What it represents: a blue-red-green tricolor with a white crescent moon and eight-pointed star, adopted in November 1918, blending pan-Turkic blue, modernizing red, and Islamic green with traditional Islamic crescent-and-star imagery — the same flag the modern republic readopts in 1991.

Russian imperial rule

Who & why: Russia's conquest of Azerbaijani territory happens in two stages. The First Russo-Persian War (1804–13) ends with the Treaty of Gulistan, which forces Qajar Persia to cede Baku, Ganja, Shirvan, Karabakh, and most of the other khanates north of the Aras River outright. The Nakhchivan khanate, further south, remains Persian until the Second Russo-Persian War ends with the February 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay, completing Russian control of the whole territory that becomes modern Azerbaijan. Baku's oil boom from the 1870s onward makes it one of the Russian Empire's most important industrial cities.

What it represents: the black-gold-white tricolor used as an unofficial "imperial" flag across the Russian Empire's territories from the mid-19th century, including its Azerbaijani provinces.

Vassal khanates under Persian suzerainty

Who & why: the 1747 assassination of Nader Shah, who had briefly reunited Persia by force, fragments Persian authority and allows a patchwork of semi-autonomous local khanates — Baku, Ganja, Shirvan, Karabakh, Quba, Sheki, Nakhchivan, and others — to emerge across Azerbaijani territory, each ruled by its own khan but paying nominal tribute to whichever Persian dynasty holds the throne. The Qajar dynasty consolidates power in Persia from 1789, tightening (without fully restoring) control over these khanates, until Russian conquest begins in 1804.

What it represents: no single flag unites these many rival khanates; the field shown is a generic, informed representation of Persian suzerain authority during this fragmented era, not a documented banner of any one khanate.

Safavid Persia

Who & why: Shah Ismail I founds the Safavid dynasty in 1501, converting Persia to Twelver Shia Islam, and within a generation the Safavids extinguish the long-ruling Shirvanshahs outright in 1538, absorbing their lands directly into the empire. Most of what becomes Azerbaijan is governed as Safavid provinces for the following two centuries, contested at the margins with the rival Ottoman Empire, until the dynasty collapses amid Afghan invasion in the 1720s and, after an interregnum, Nader Shah's 1747 assassination opens the way to local khanates.

What it represents: a teal field with a gold roundel, representative of Safavid dynastic and religious imagery associated with the period's coinage and court banners across the empire's provinces, including Shirvan.

Shirvanshahs and local emirates

Who & why: the Shirvanshahs, ruling from Shamakhi (later Baku) in what is now northeastern Azerbaijan, are attested from the 9th century and go on ruling, remarkably, in some form for nearly seven centuries — through Mongol invasion, Timur's campaigns, and constant pressure from larger neighbors — making them one of the longest-lived dynasties anywhere in this atlas. Other parts of Azerbaijani territory in this long span pass through various local Muslim dynasties and, briefly, Mongol Ilkhanate overlordship in the 13th–14th centuries. The line finally ends in 1538, when the Safavids depose the last Shirvanshah and absorb his lands directly.

What it represents: no single Shirvanshah state flag is documented with certainty; the green field and white crescent shown here are an informed representation drawing on general Islamic dynastic heraldic conventions of the era, not a specific surviving banner.

Caucasian Albania and the Sassanid/Arab conquest

Who & why: Caucasian Albania, a kingdom in the eastern Caucasus roughly overlapping modern Azerbaijan, is attested from the 4th century BCE and survives for the better part of a millennium as a shifting client of Rome, Parthia, and above all Sassanid Persia. King Urnayr's conversion to Christianity around 370 CE, under Armenian ecclesiastical influence, opens centuries of semi-autonomous Christian rule by the Arranshahik dynasty even as Sassanid Persia dominates the kingdom's foreign policy. The Umayyad Caliphate's conquest of the Caucasus, completed by 705 CE, ends this autonomy for good; the fractured, gradually Islamizing local dynasties that follow — including the Shirvanshahs, attested from 861 — inherit post-Albanian Shirvan directly.

What it represents: no flag survives from Caucasian Albania; its kings are known through Armenian and Georgian chronicles, Sassanid-era inscriptions, and archaeology, not through any vexillological record. Shown here honestly blank rather than invented.

World context: this span runs alongside the Parthian and Sassanid empires' long wars with Rome, the construction of the Sassanid palace at Ctesiphon, and the rapid 7th-century Arab conquests that end the Sassanid Empire itself in 651 CE — the same conquest wave that reaches Caucasian Albania barely a generation later, in 705.