Image by
Jorge Candeias, 22 Dec 1999
Last modified: 2014-06-07 by bruce berry
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Image by
Jorge Candeias, 22 Dec 1999
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According to the Ethiopian Parliament
websitesite,
"the State of Tigray consists of 4 administrative zones, one special zone, 35 woredas and 74
towns. It is located at the northern tip of the country. The region
shares common borders with Eritrea in the north, the State of
Afar in the
east, the State of Amhara in the south, and the Republic of the
Sudan in
the west. The capital city is Mekele and the State of Tigray has an
estimated area of 80,000 square kilometers."
What this means is that the old province of Tigray grew with territory
formerly belonging to the province of Gonder to give birth to this state
(eventually with border arrangements with other administrative divisions).
Mekele was previously the capital of the old province.
Jorge Candeias, 22 Dec 1999
The flag adopted for the state is red with a golden yellow triangle at the hoist and a large star of the same colour centered in the fly. The star is rotated to point at the fly.
Image
by Jorge Candeias, 22 Dec 1999
The flag of Tigray is
based on the design of the flag of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPFL).
In The World of Flags by William Crampton (1990) [cra90]
it states
that "The Tigre Liberation Front is fighting a similar battle in the
Ethiopian province of Tigre [he refers here to the Eritrean People's
Liberation Front] and is one of the more successful of several such
secessionist groups in Ethiopia."
The TPLF flag according to Crampton is only different in its dimensions
and rotation of the star (which is upright).
Jorge Candeias, 22 Dec 1999
I ran across a receipt from a trip I took to Ethiopia a year and a half ago. Most of it is in Amharic and only English text on it reads: "Tigray National Regional Administration." The amazing thing is that the symbol at the top is almost the same as the symbol found on the flag used between 1987-1991. The difference is that there is no star and it is split horizontally in half. The upper half has the leaves, cog wheel, Axum obalisk and spears. On the bottom half the leaves turn into a cog wheel and the dividing line holds two ends of a scale, like a scale of justice.
So why is it that the Tigray administration is using a modified communist
symbol, especially considering that Tigray was the region most opposed to the
communist regime in Ethiopia?
Robert Wilson, 02 Feb 2004
