Flag Saga Part 2: East Timor

East Timor Flag

In November of 2018 I wrote a long post about the reflectional and rotational symmetry of flags. The post included a little aside about the seemingly arbitrary orientation of the star on East Timor’s flag. A year and a half later and the orientation of that star was still bugging me so I did some digging.

Section 15 of the Constitution of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste states:

“The National Flag is rectangular and is formed by two isosceles triangles, the bases of which are overlapping. One triangle is black and its height is equal to one-third of the length overlapped to the yellow triangle, whose height is equal to half the length of the Flag. In the center of the black triangle there is a white star of five ends, meaning the light that guides. The white star has one of its ends turned towards the left side end of the flag. The remaining part of the flag is red.”

It then outlines what each color on the flag symbolizes but there is nothing specific about the angle of the star other than “the white star has one of its ends turned towards the left side of the flag”.

But the point of the star doesn’t face directly left. Most stars on flags have at least one point that points straight up, straight out from the center, straight down, straight at the left or right edge of the flag etc. but East Timor’s flag doesn’t seem to want to play by any of those rules.

I was about to open the flag in photoshop so I could take precise measurements and calculate the exact angles of the star’s points when I finally found an image of the construction sheet for the United Nations Transitional Authority in East Timor. It turns out that on the construction sheet (the image with the angles and relative measurements), if you draw a line from the center of the star through the upper left corner of the flag, it perfectly bisects the upper-most point on the star.

East Timor Flag Construction Sheet

That made a lot of sense but I could have sworn that I checked that when I originally wrote the flag post and none of the lines bisecting any of the points of the star pointed towards anything specific on the flag (like a corner).

That’s when I noticed that there is an error on the construction sheet. If you define the base of the triangles as the left side of the flag, then the height of the black triangle on the flag is significantly longer than it is on the official construction sheet. The height of the back triangle is supposed to be 1/3 the length of the flag but is instead 1/4 the length of the flag.

It looks like they fixed that error on the flag by extending the black triangle and then moving (horizontally translating) the white star to the right but they seem to have neglected to readjust the angle of the star so that it remained pointed at the upper left corner of the flag from its new position.

I found evidence of an acknowledgement of the original construction sheet error but I haven’t found any evidence that anyone has noticed the failure to re-adjust the orientation of the star in the corrected flag. I can’t be the first weirdo to notice this and write about it can I?

tl;dr: It seems as though there was at one point a reasonable explanation for the orientation of the star on East Timor’s flag but due to an error on the original construction sheet and a second error when correcting that construction sheet, the angle of the star now appears to be arbitrary.

Click here for even more East Timor flag drama in Flag Saga Part 3: More Timor or Vexing Vexillology.