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Montana | Монтана province (Bulgaria)

No information is available about the provincial flag.

City of Montana

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Subnational Flags (Bulgaria)
Bulgaria

City of Montana

image by Stoyan Antonov, 10 August 2005

The city of Montana is the capital of the province of Montana. Up to 1891 it was the village of Golyama Kutlovica; after its proclamation as a town in 1891 it was renamed after the Bulgarian monarch Ferdinand; in the 1945-1993 period it was Mihaylovgrad after the name of a local communist hero; since 1993 it has been Montana after the castrum from the Roman age.

In October 1935 the municipal council adopted the coat of arms and the flag of Montana (then Ferdinand) after the design of Nikola Litonov, a local artist. The flag is white over sky-blue with the national tricolour in the canton. The meaning of the flag is explained as follows: the white is for peace and diligence; the sky-blue for "civil devotion to king, nation and fatherland"; the tricolour is "a mark of affiliation and fidelity to our Fatherland – Bulgaria". The source of that information is "Traditions in the Local Self-government", an article by Rayna Antonova from the Montana Historical Museum, published at http://www.montana.bg/town/obshtinata/rantonova-museum.php.
During the communist period this flag was not used, but maybe a couple of years ago, it was readopted. I saw it together with other municipal flags in an exhibition of local authorities, which took place in Plovdiv last May. Besides that, this may have been the first municipal flag in Bulgaria; it is also the only one without a logo or coat of arms.
Stoyan Antonov, 10 August 2005