Pakistan Latest To Chase 'Largest Flag' Record

On October 22, 24,200 young Pakistanis crowded into Lahore's National Hockey Stadium to hold up colored placards forming the Pakistani flag.

The crowd erupted in cheers when the representative from Guinness World Records announced that they had indeed created the "world's largest human flag," breaking a record held by a crowd of Portuguese women since 2006.

"The participants said they were showing the beautiful image of Pakistan to the rest of the world and expressing their unity under the flag of Pakistan," Pakistan's "The News" reported.

Clearly on a roll, 1,936 Pakistani students broke another record, by forming the largest "human picture mosaic" of the Lahore Fort at the stadium.

Kicking off this record-setting exuberance in Lahore was the first in the chain of mass-patriotism events, when over 42,000 young Pakistanis sang the national anthem in unison at the Punjab Youth Festival 2012. The Lahore stadium crowd crushed the previous record set by a mere 15,000 some people in India in January 2012.

Pakistan's flag-waving one-upmanship is the latest in a series of records set in the last few years. Just last year, Ukrainians in the eastern city of Dnipropetrovsk commemorated the country's Constitution Day by unfurling what they said was the world's largest national flag.

Measuring 30 meters by 45 meters, the flag was however not mounted on a flagpole, so it seems it wasn't in competition with the enormous flag raised in the Azerbaijani capital in 2010.

At 35 meters by 70 meters and mounted on a 162-meter-high flagpole, the flag ended up being taken down in February 2011 because the pole could no longer bear the strain.

Not to be outdone, Tajikistan has staked its claim to the world's highest flagpole. At 165 meters high, Dushanbe's flag also measured a respectable 30 meters by 60 meters.

Still, none of them measure up this Israeli effort. While it's not mounted on a pole, it certainly would seem to dwarf other flags at a monstrous 18,843 square meters.