Vykhradia — February to May 1860 — the Age of Empire
Historical context
The flag of Vykhradia carries, in 1890, eleven white stripes upon wine-red. One for each magnate house, and two of them for houses extinct.
Anyone seeing it from outside takes it for mourning. It is not. It is bookkeeping: the stripes of the dead houses remain because their voice did not vanish, it was inherited, and a kingdom that erases a stripe admits that somebody came away with two votes.
This account is about how the eleventh stripe came to be a dead house's stripe.
