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Bikini Atoll

Ralik Chain, Marshall Islands

Although appearing bizarre and ugly at first, the flag of Bikini Atoll makes a sad reflection on the history of the island and its people, with glimmers of local traditions and culture trying to bleed through an immovable American façade.

Bikini Atoll's entrance into darkness came less than a century ago, when American nuclear scientists sought an adequate place for testing atomic bombs, ending up at the Marshallese reefs. Unaware of the true devastation to come, the Bikinian leader agreed to pass the island to the U.S. Army, being exiled to other islands with inadequate food sources. After the detonation of the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb in 1954, the islands became a wasteland, still uninhabitable to this day.

The flag is a defaced American flag, with 23 stars in its canton to mirror the number of islands belonging to the atoll. The three black stars in the north fly pay homage to the three islands obliterated during the nuclear testing; the two other black stars symbolise the islands to which the Bikinians were relocated, symbolically distanced from the canton's stars to reflect both the islands' far-off location from Bikini Atoll and the large gap in quality of life. The phrase below the canton translates to 'Everything is in the hands of God', the Bikinian leader's response to America's request.

This flag is not just that of a desolate contaminated atoll, but a banner under which every displaced Bikinian rallies angrily against the United States - reminder to them that they owe an extortionate debt.

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Miquelon-Langlade

St Pierre and Miquelon, France

Miquelon-Langlade is the larger of the two main islands that make up the French overseas territory of St Pierre and Miquelon, just off the coast of Newfoundland. Its flag focuses on the different ancestries of its inhabitants.

Although the only official flag of French overseas departments and collectivities is the French Tricolore, that hasn't stopped local residents from making their own designs to better represent themselves.

The base of the design is a tricolour of blue, white and red, with a golden star in the canton; this is the flag of the Acadians, a group of French-descended inhabitants of the Canadian East Coast, who relocated to the French archipelago after refusing to live under the rule of the British once they had gained control of Acadia. Below that is an engrailed green band, representing the rough terrain of the island and hope for the Miquelonais, only 580 in number, to continue populating the island, which is surmounted by a long-tailed duck, holding in its beak the flags of Brittany, Normandy and the Basque Country, whose fishermen served as the initial inhabitants of the territory. Below the duck are three codfish, which were both key sources of food for the islands' early residents. Today, seafood makes up an enormous part of St Pierre and Miquelon's economy, in particular the exportation of lobster and crawfish.

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Nový Kostel

Karlovy Vary Region, Czech Republic

The Czech Republic has nearly 6300 municipalities, with volunteers at the Czech Vexillology Association actively collaborating with local governments in order to get every one of them their own flag. Nový Kostel is a small village seven kilometres away from the German border; its flag narrates one of the several disasters the village faced during the mid-19th Century.

Nový Kostel was founded around the construction of a new church in 1613, expanding and absorbing surrounding villages into its parish a hundred years later. At the start of the 1840s, the local area experienced a long-lasting drought, sparking famines across many of its small agrarian villages, including Nový Kostel. Three years afterwards, the parish went through a severe thunderstorm, wherein lightning struck the village's 200-year-old church and set it blaze, engulfing its organ and melting its bells. The people entered yet even more calamity, however, when the Bohemian Army, sent to help in the church's restoration, introduced typhoid fever to the region. The church was gradually reconstructed, being fully restored in 1884 with the erection of a new clock tower.

Nowadays, although still largely unheard of, Nový Kostel serves as the local region's violin production specialist, which is acknowledged in the village's coat-of-arms.