Fun Facts About the EU Flag
The EU flag depicts twelve golden stars in a circle on a blue field.
Before it was the flag of the EU, this was the flag of the Council of Europe, which designed it based on ideas submitted to a contest and tweaked by a committee of the Council.
The original contest-winning design had fifteen stars, representing the fifteen member states of the Council of Europe. Before adopting it, the committee decided to change the number of stars to twelve.
There had never been twelve of anything in the Council of Europe - it had ten founding members, with Greece joining the following year and then Iceland, Turkey and West Germany all signing up the year after that.
The committee's official explanation for their choice was that the number twelve is a "symbol of perfection and entirety".
Nobody knows what the heck that means.
Some people have suggested that the ring of twelve stars on blue was inspired by religious art, like this statue of the Virgin Mary in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg:
The same year that the Council of Europe adopted the twelve-star flag, an enormous new stained-glass window was installed in the same Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg which made this connection explicit (it's known as the "Window of Europe"):
The crown of twelve stars is not just a decoration; it has a very specific religious meaning. In the Book of Revelation, a woman appears "clothed in the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars". Traditionally known as the "Woman of the Apocalypse", she is the counterpart figure to the Whore of Babylon, and is responsible for bearing the child whose enmity with a demonic dragon leads to a "war in Heaven" at the end of days.
In Catholic tradition, the Woman of the Apocalypse is identified with the Virgin Mary.
At its founding, the European Union adopted the twelve-star flag unchanged.
The EU technically has three separate presidents - the heads of the European Parliament, the European Commission, and the European Council respectively.
The President of the European Parliament has diplomatic primacy, and is listed first in every treaty affecting the three presidents.
The other two presidents work exclusively in Brussels, where almost every EU institution is headquartered.
The European Parliament, however, by law must carry out at least half of its proceedings in the city of Strasbourg, France.
This is the center of the Hemicycle where the Parliament meets in Strasbourg:
The person in the very center, who's lined up directly under the EU flag, is the President of the European Parliament.
This building is just a short stroll up the river from the Cathedral of Strasbourg.
The last female President of the European Parliament, Nicole Fontaine, was also the last one to hail from France.
Most Parliament Presidents don't dress all in yellow for their official portrait, or pose in front of the EU flag.
Fontaine was President of the European Parliament when the Euro was first introduced, at the turn of the Millennium.
The Eurozone Crisis of the 2010s culminated in a series of deadly riots in the ancient city of Athens.
That crisis demonstrated the necessity of integrating Europe fiscally as well monetarily - making it effectively one polity under a united sovereign.
Luckily, nothing like that has ever been prophesied, and there's no other evidence that we're currently living in the end times.
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