#maltese cross

[dozydawn]

[faguscarolinensis]

Silene chalcedonica / Maltese Cross at the Denver Botanic Gardens in Denver, CO

[all-action-all-picture]

Home Planet by Mike Winkelmann (Beeple). For some reason the two crosses on the Knight's shields are different. I'm not a heraldic expert but the one on the left looks like the Cross pattée (the four arms have flat ends) and the one on the right is a Maltese Cross (the four arms are shaped like arrowheads pointing inward). Other than that everything looks perfectly normal.

[retrocgads]

UK 1987

[platinum-iridium]

to the anon out there who stopped watching criminal intent because of logan, there's this one episode where the cold open is him getting jumped by the fire department. highly recommend if you hate him

[intramir]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_St._Olav

[petermorwood]

Small note: I've seen other posters making this request:

Don't c*nsor topics, apparently it means they aren't caught and blocked by trigger / content warnings set by people who don't want to see them.

*****

Confusion probably arose because until 2018 Germany had a total ban (still tightly controlled and judged on a case-by-case basis) on Nazi imagery and especially swastikas in, let's call it "frivolous contexts", so the gaming industry, among others, used to represent them like this:

That banner uses a cross patée (in this instance the designer would probably have called it an Iron Cross) to represent the swastika of the original, which would have prevented the game from being sold in Germany.

The real banner had a smaller cross patée in one quarter and a swastika in the circle. Besides using an Iron Cross as substitute, another method of censoring an illegal symbol involves breaking the symbol up.

All these are, AFAIK, completely okay even though it's completely obvious what they were.

Broken symbols also seem to be a common loophole approach with model kit decals, "some assembly required"...

...and paintwork on restored warbird aircraft.

The D-prefix code and national flag under the tailplane shows that this one is registered in Germany.

*****

The Iron Cross as a medal was created in 1813 during the Napoleonic Wars. The cross patée as heraldic charge and artistic symbol - as used in the architecture on the "Good Omens" poster - goes back about 1500 years. Both are far older than Nazis. TBH, so is the swastika / fylfot / gammadion.

It also appears on war memorials. (Thank you, @when-i-am-bored.)

Numerous current medals and insignia have cross patée form, and many are their country's high - indeed highest - awards for gallantry. Ill-informed assumption based on mere shape could provoke responses ranging from amusement to anger to deep offence.

Research Is Good. See TVTropes "No Swastikas" for some.

*****

Moving away from That Lot...

While the cross pattée was used before WWI on Prussian banners, flags and medals, to ID German aircraft and tanks during WWI...

...and is used by modern Germany for the same purpose...

...WWI air combat stories commonly but incorrectly call (or called) it a "Maltese Cross".

(I read a lot of "Biggles" stories when I was a kid. The First World War ones were better than all the rest combined...)

However, heraldry being such a precise field - get it wrong and you might attack an ally - the actual Maltese Cross is Similar But Different, with distinctive notches in the arms.

Besides various other medals, it's the logo of the St John's Ambulance Service and the Order of Malta Volunteer Ambulance Corps:

...though curiously enough in Malta itself, the Maltese Cross is a much smaller part of one ambulance's blue cross logo and doesn't appear at all on another.

I suppose when you actually live in a place you don't need something to remind you.

Or, to misquote "Good Omens" the novel:

"...people in Trafalgar Square don’t need to see England to know it's there."

Hi Neil! Sorry to bother you with quite an odd question but my friend won’t stop buggering me about it.

I know this would be a question to ask the prime design team but do you know what type of cross this is?

My friend keeps saying it’s related to n*zi’s and saying it shouldn’t be used anywhere, so I just wanted to see if you had the name or if it was just a random design pattern

Have a good day!

Your friend is wrong.

Here's an earlier answer to the same question.

[bugatsu]

A painting of a Maltese Cross with the same eyes as “luzzu”, very rare.

[raggednorth]

So, the vases that were mostly frosted, except for the Maltese cross turned out really nice. The ones where only the Maltese cross was frosted did not! I didn't even take a picture of them, they were so bad! I wound up cleaning those ones off and re-spraying them to match the others that did turn out. So, in the end, all my vases were the same, but they all looked good at least.

I brought them to the fire hall for set-up and we filled half with black stones and white flowers and half with red gems, a flameless candle, and thin red line flags.

I also wound up making a poster to hang up by the table of gifts that the auxiliary got for the firefighters.

[dozydawn]

enamel maltese cross necklace by marius hammer

[g63heavenonearth]

Allegheny Cemetery 11-12-14-45

[ducktracy]

i reset a bunch of my Animal Crossing towns in a variety of games like i always end up doing and am thusly rebooting my bullying compilation 2.0. i can tell it's going to be filled to the brim which is why i'm starting a new. look at these ingrates

evidently i am also quite scary

[trailerparktombombadil]

Best Friend Goth Garden

Presenting the Gargoyle Bois - aka the Boiyles. The Maltese Cross bloomed finally. I have zero idea what the third pic is, but it's super cool.

Progress is currently very slow, but that's okay. There's a lot going on right now trying to steal me from gardening 😤

On super sunny days I have to pitch the canopy so I don't burn, but I managed to get myself burned anyway at the fishing lake. Lizard brain was like "not garden? No sunscreen". 😑 Believe me I am too old and too vain to be messing around and finding out like that.

[krispiifloof]

[gesray]