French journalist Fabrice Deprez, who's working in Kyiv as a correspondent for the newspaper La Croix, caught our attention with his series of tweets about what he called Russia's "weird and magnificent" regional flags featuring animals. We thought they were so cool that we're sharing them here, along with Deprez's own commentary.
The Cute Creatures Found On Russia's Weird And Wonderful Regional Flags
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Yes, the flag of Zheleznogorsk is a bear splitting an atom. Yes, it’s cool as hell. The city was founded to support a plutonium production facility. It makes satellites now.
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Probably my favorite flag from a purely aesthetic standpoint. It flies over the Yamal district, near the Arctic Ocean. And get this: The antlers of the deer (an important animal for the indigenous population) are flames, a nod to the region’s massive gas fields.
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The flag of Irkutsk featuring an unknown creature that appears, according to Russia-watcher Michael Elgort, to be a beaver with the legs of a platypus holding a fox in its mouth. (Looks more like a cat of some kind than a beaver to us, but no matter.)
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The flag of Yakutsk is kinda lame, but its coat of arms is thankfully different, showing a fierce eagle holding a proud sable. That’s one of the more historical ones, as it was first approved by Catherine II in 1790.
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The flag of Vovchansk in the Sverdlovsk region. The rodent is cute. There’s a neat detail, too: The three stars represent the district’s three places by order of size (one city, one village, one small village). Except...the smallest village actually had a population of zero and officially disappeared two months ago.
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The Domnovskoye rural settlement in the Kaliningrad region doesn’t mess around, with a single, badass eagle's paw.
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Probably the fanciest one of the bunch. The A is for the river Akhtuba, after which the district – called Sredneakhtubinsky, in the Volgograd region – is named. The cranes are for “cheerfulness and love,” and the crown symbolizes the region’s wealth.
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Next up is this incredibly cute mammoth on the flag of Srednekolymsk, a small city 5,300 kilometers east of Moscow in a region where frozen mammoths are regularly found.
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Welcome to the rural settlement of Syaskelevskoye in the Leningrad region (next to St. Petersburg), inhabited by about 5,000 people. The flag is based on the coat of arms of the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, whose estate was located there.
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Not sure if ammonites qualify as animals, but I just love how clean this flag is. It flies over the Ulyanovsk district in the Ulyanovsk region (named after Vladimir Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, who was born there). It’s one of the rare flags not to have its own dedicated Wikipedia page, so I can’t give you the official meaning, but I know locals often find such fossils on the shores of the Volga, so that may be it.
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More fanciness. The flag of Palekh in the Ivanovo region (not far from Moscow) depicts the firebird, a staple of Slavic folklore that is said to have originated from that city. (The firebird is depicted on many of the signature lacquer boxes made in Palekh.)
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Meanwhile, in the district of Khoroshyovo-Mnyovniki in Moscow, this is happening.
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Speaking of folklore, the coat of arms for the district of Mogocha shows the Dyabdar, a giant winged snake that is part of the mythology of the Evenk people. Mogocha is 80 kilometers north of the Chinese border. Evenks are present in China, Russia, and Mongolia.
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Bears are, unsurprisingly, a very common theme in Russian regional flags. I have a weakness for the bear carrying a Bible on the flag of Perm, near the Urals. He looks so happy.