Flag: Bosnia & Herzegovina Emoji

The flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A medium blue field with a yellow right triangle in the fly (the side away from the flagpole), and nine stars running along the triangle's hypotenuse: seven full five-pointed stars plus two half-stars at the top and bottom. Ratio 1:2. Adopted February 4, 1998 by decree of UN High Representative Carlos Westendorp after the country's three parliamentary factions (Bosniak, Croat, Serb) failed to agree on a design themselves.

The triangle points three ways, once for each constituent people. It also roughly traces the shape of the country on a map. The stars are meant to signify Europe and deliberately "continue infinitely" off both edges of the flag, hence the half-stars. The blue and yellow echo the Council of Europe and EU palettes on purpose. The whole design is an exercise in emptying out national symbols: no eagle, no cross, no crescent, no lily. That neutrality is exactly what some Bosniaks still resent (many prefer the 1992 flag with six Kotromanić lilies, now the flag of the Federation entity). Bosnian Serbs often fly the Republika Srpska flag (red-blue-white tricolor) instead. But when you type :BA::BA: in Discord or Slack, this is what comes up.

🇧🇦 spikes around three things: football (Zmajevi, "the Dragons"), Sarajevo anniversaries (the 1984 Olympics, the 1992 to 1996 siege, the 2014 World Cup debut), and diaspora Flag Day posts. The national football team's penalty-shootout defeat of Italy on March 31, 2026, which sent Bosnia to a second World Cup in team history, produced the biggest sustained 🇧🇦 wave on social since qualification for 2014.

Emoji 2.0 (2015), regional indicator pair U+1F1E7U+1F1E7 + U+1F1E6U+1F1E6 (B + A). Platforms without flag support fall back to BABA.

Football is still the biggest single driver. Zmajevi (Dragons), the national team's nickname, was popularized by TV commentator Mustafa Mijajlović during a March 2009 qualifier. Edin Džeko, 40 years old and the all-time top scorer, has now played in two World Cup qualifications that went to the wire. The 2026 WC playoff against Italy (held in Zenica on March 31, won 4 to 1 on penalties) rolled through Bosnian Twitter and TikTok for weeks. Džeko asked Bosnian fans to applaud Italy's anthem before kickoff; that clip alone got 40M+ views.

Diaspora identity runs heavy. Roughly 2 million Bosnians live abroad out of a resident population of 3.1M. St. Louis, Missouri is the single largest Bosnian city outside Bosnia (~70,000 Bosnian-Americans). Germany has 240K+, Austria 180K+, Sweden 65K+. Second-generation Bosnians post 🇧🇦 alongside their host-country flag on Independence Day (March 1, in the Federation) and on Statehood Day (November 25).

Sarajevo anniversaries. The Siege of Sarajevo lasted 1,425 days, the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare. 🇧🇦 spikes every April 5 (siege anniversary), June 28 (Franz Ferdinand / Vidovdan), July 11 (Srebrenica remembrance), and during the annual Sarajevo Film Festival in August, which was born during the siege in 1995.

Balkan food discourse. In the TikTok cevapi-wars genre, 🇧🇦 is the flag most associated with Sarajevo-style ćevapi (10 small unseasoned fingers in lepina bread, with raw onion and kajmak). Every video about 'best ćevapi' turns into a multi-flag argument across 🇧🇦 🇷🇸 and 🇲🇰 comment sections.

• 🏙️
  Capital: Sarajevo (43.86°N, 18.41°E)
• 👥
  Population: ~3.11 million (2026); another ~2 million in the diaspora
• 🗺️
  Area: 51,197 km²
• 💵
  Currency: Convertible mark (BAM, KM); pegged 1.95583 to the euro
• 🗣️
  Languages: Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian (all official; mutually intelligible)
• 🕌
  Religions: ~51% Muslim, ~31% Orthodox, ~15% Catholic
• 📞
  Calling code: +387
• ⏰
  Time zone: CET (UTC+1), CEST (UTC+2) in summer
• 🌐
  Internet TLD: .ba

Foods that show up next to 🇧🇦

Landmarks that anchor travel content

The 1992 flag. When Bosnia declared independence from Yugoslavia in March 1992, it adopted a white flag with a blue shield of six gold lilies (fleurs-de-lis), inherited from the medieval Kotromanić dynasty. The Siege of Sarajevo began less than a month later. For the duration of the war, that lily flag flew over the besieged city.

The Dayton stalemate. After the Dayton Agreement (initialed November 21, 1995, signed December 14), Bosnia was split into two entities: the Bosniak-Croat Federation and the Bosnian-Serb Republika Srpska. For the lily flag, Bosnian Serbs and Croats rejected it as too Bosniak-coded. Parliament deadlocked for almost three years. Three proposed replacements failed in a row.

The 1998 imposition. On February 4, 1998, UN High Representative Carlos Westendorp, exercising his Bonn Powers authority, simply proclaimed a new design: Mladen Kolobarić's triangle-and-stars. It's one of the few national flags in the world that wasn't chosen by the country itself.

Reception. Many Bosniaks still fly the old lily flag at weddings and sports events; it survives today as the official flag of the Federation entity. Republika Srpska uses its own entity flag, a red-blue-white pan-Slavic tricolor, at almost every public occasion. 🇧🇦 is the one the rest of the world sees, and the one the national football team wears, so it has slowly gained legitimacy with younger generations who were born after 1998.

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  March 1: Independence Day: Marks the 1992 referendum declaring independence from Yugoslavia. Federation entity only; not observed in Republika Srpska.
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  April 5: Day of remembrance, Siege of Sarajevo: Commemorates the first day of the 1,425-day siege in 1992. Candles at the Markale memorial.
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  July 11: Srebrenica Genocide Remembrance Day: UN-designated day (since 2024) for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. Funerals continue annually at Potočari Memorial Center as remains are identified.
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  Mid-August: Sarajevo Film Festival: [Founded in 1995 during the siege](https://sff.ba/en/about-sff), now Southeast Europe's largest film festival. Draws 100,000+ visitors; the Heart of Sarajevo award is the region's top prize.
• 🏛️
  November 25: Statehood Day: Commemorates the 1943 ZAVNOBiH session that re-established Bosnia as a Yugoslav republic. Federation entity only.

• •Bosnia's flag is one of the only national flags in the world imposed by an international official rather than chosen by the country itself. Designer Mladen Kolobarić; proclaimed by Carlos Westendorp on February 4, 1998.
• •The Siege of Sarajevo (April 5, 1992 to February 29, 1996) lasted 1,425 days, the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare. An estimated 13,952 people died, including 5,434 civilians.
• •Sarajevo has a mosque, a Catholic cathedral, an Orthodox cathedral, and a Sephardic synagogue all within a 200-meter radius of the Baščaršija old bazaar. It's sometimes called the Jerusalem of Europe.
• •Ivo Andrić, a Yugoslav novelist born in Travnik, Bosnia, won the 1961 Nobel Prize in Literature for The Bridge on the Drina, a multi-generational novel centered on an Ottoman bridge in the eastern Bosnian town of Višegrad.
• •Bosnia has just 20 km of coastline at the town of Neum, which splits Croatia in two. Until Croatia joined Schengen in January 2023, travelers on the Adriatic coastal road had to cross four border checks to drive from Split to Dubrovnik.
• •Bosnian Edin Džeko, the national team's all-time top scorer, was six years old when the siege began. His family's home was destroyed and 15 relatives lived in his grandparents' 35 m² apartment. He is the 2026 World Cup's oldest outfield player at 40.
• •The 1984 Winter Olympics were the first Winter Games ever held in a communist country and the first in a Slavic-speaking one. Jure Franko's silver in giant slalom was Yugoslavia's only Winter Games medal in its entire history.
• •Bosnia's diaspora is estimated at nearly 2 million, roughly 64% the size of the resident population. St. Louis, Missouri hosts around 70,000 Bosnian-Americans, the largest concentration outside the Balkans.

• •🇧🇦 is a regional indicator sequence: U+1F1E7U+1F1E7 (B) + U+1F1E6U+1F1E6 (A). ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code: BABA.
• •Unsupported platforms render it as the letters BABA. Common in older Windows chat clients and some Linux distributions.
• •Shortcode: :flag_ba::flag_ba: or :bosnia_herzegovina::bosnia_herzegovina: on most messaging platforms.

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