Flag of the Greek Orthodox Church Flag of the Greek Orthodox Church The Ecumenical Patriarchate and Mount Athos, and also the Greek Orthodox Churches in the diaspora under the Patriarchate use a black double-headed eagle in a yellow field as their flag or emblem. The eagle is depicted as clutching a sceptre and an orb with a crown above and between its two heads. An earlier variant of the flag, used in the 1980s, combined the double-headed eagle design with the blue-and-white stripes of the flag of Greece. The design is sometimes dubbed the "Byzantine imperial flag", and is considered—inaccurately—to have been the actual historical banner
Flag of Greece flags was the "labarum". In the surviving pictorial sources of the middle and later Empire, primarily the illustrated Skylitzes Chronicle, the predominating colours are red and blue in horizontal stripes, with a cross often placed in the centre of the flag. Other common symbols, prominently featuring on seals, were depictions of Christ, the Virgin Mary and saints, but these represent personal rather than family or state symbols. Western European-style heraldry was largely unknown until the last centuries of the Empire. There is no mention of any "state" flag until the mid-14th century, when a Spanish atlas, the "Conosçimiento de todos