Eritrea’s national flag has 30 leaves in the olive wreath surrounding its emblem. The thirty leaves symbolize the roughly thirty years of armed struggle that preceded Eritrea’s independence from Ethiopia.
The wreath and upright olive branch are derived from the emblem used on Eritrea’s 1952 flag, when the country entered a federation with Ethiopia. In the present design, the yellow emblem sits inside the red triangle near the hoist. The wreath contains fourteen leaves on each side, plus the central leaves associated with the branch, producing a total of thirty.
Eritrea’s flag combines elements of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front flag with the earlier olive-branch symbol. It was first officially hoisted after independence on 24 May 1993, while the standardized version with thirty leaves was adopted on 5 December 1995.
The number is sometimes confused with the number of years between a particular pair of political dates, but it refers broadly to the independence struggle, which began in 1961 and ended with independence in 1993. The colours have separate meanings: green represents agriculture, blue the sea, and red the blood shed in the struggle.