Klaudij Duzh-Dushewski (1891–1959): The Man Who Designed the White-Red-White Flag

Chapter 1. The Boy from the Borderland
Once upon a time, in a land where forests stretched beyond the horizon and old roads connected towns speaking different languages, there lived a boy named Klaudij.
His home stood in Hlybokaye, a town in the Vilna Governorate of the Russian Empire. The people around him carried many memories: stories of Belarusian villages, Lithuanian rulers, Polish books, and a time when the lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had connected communities across a vast region.
Klaudij's family carried these layers of history too. Through his mother's line, his family was connected to the Polish szlachta of the former Polotsk district. His parents described themselves as Belarusians of Polish culture.
To the boy, these stories seemed like threads woven into one large tapestry. One thread did not have to disappear for another to be visible.
As a child, Klaudij liked to watch his father work with building materials. He studied the shape of roofs, the strength of walls, and the way a bridge could bring two distant banks together.
“Why do people build bridges?” he once asked.
“So that people can reach one another,” his father replied.
Klaudij remembered those words.
Years later, he would build bridges of another kind: between a family's complicated past and a nation's hopes for the future, between his Belarusian political commitments and his professional life in Lithuania.
But first, he needed to learn how to draw what did not yet exist.
Chapter 2. The Evening of the Three Stripes
In 1917, the old Russian Empire began to fall apart.
Across its western lands, people gathered to discuss the future. Belarusians who had long struggled for recognition began imagining a country that could govern itself, preserve its language, and choose its own symbols.
Klaudij joined the work of the Belarusian national movement.
A new nation, he believed, needed a flag: something simple enough to be recognised from a distance and meaningful enough to unite people who did not agree on everything.
One evening, he sat among old books and sheets of paper, trying different arrangements of colours.
White.
Red.
White again.
But how should the colours be arranged? Which shape could carry the hopes of a people?
From the neighbouring room came the voices of activists arguing over politics. The discussion grew louder, then louder still.
Suddenly, someone rushed out and exclaimed:
“Where there are two Belarusians, there are three parties!”
Klaudij looked at his papers.
Two white stripes.
One red stripe between them.
A flag with three horizontal bands.
In the popular story, that joke gave him the final spark of inspiration.
He drew the design carefully and imagined it rising above a gathering of people who wanted Belarus to have a future of its own.
The anecdote is remembered as a charming explanation for the flag's shape, though historians cannot treat every detail of the scene as established fact. What is better supported is that Duzh-Dushewski prepared flag designs in 1917 and that the white-red-white design became associated with the Belarusian national movement.
The flag was more than a drawing.
It was a promise that a people could choose a symbol of their own.
Chapter 3. The Knight from the Old Book
The flag was not the only symbol that occupied Klaudij's imagination.
In an old book, he found the image of a mounted knight holding a sword: the Pahonia, a coat of arms associated with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
The knight seemed to ride out of another century.
The Grand Duchy had once included extensive Belarusian lands as well as territories of present-day Lithuania. Its legacy belonged to the historical memory of both peoples, although Belarusians and Lithuanians interpreted that past in different ways.
“What does the knight protect?” Klaudij wondered.
A border?
A city?
A memory?
Or the possibility that a people might decide its own future?
In the world of the fairy tale, the knight stepped out of the page and stood beside him.
“I can remind you of the past,” said the knight. “But I cannot tell you how to build the future.”
Klaudij understood.
Some Belarusian activists hoped that cooperation with Lithuania, perhaps even a federation between the two, could help protect Belarus from the competing pressures of Poland and Bolshevik Russia. Others disagreed about the best path to independence.
Lithuania and Poland also struggled over Vilnius and the surrounding region. A shared past did not make their political goals identical.
The knight returned to the book.
Klaudij kept the lesson: history could offer people symbols and memories, but no symbol could settle every political argument.
The future would have to be built through choices, negotiations, and the difficult work of respecting the identities of neighbouring peoples.
Chapter 4. The Architect of Kaunas
Years later, Klaudij moved to Kaunas, where he began a new chapter of his life.
The city was becoming the centre of Lithuania's political and cultural life. Streets changed, new public buildings rose, and architects searched for ways to express the hopes of a modern country.
Klaudij studied engineering and became an architect.
His desk filled with rulers, compasses, pencils, maps, and drawings. He designed buildings and worked on projects that became part of Lithuania's developing urban landscape.
He was a Belarusian political activist, but his professional work contributed to Lithuania.
These two facts did not cancel each other out.
When he looked at a building site, he thought about practical things: the strength of a wall, the weight of a roof, the light entering a room, and the needs of the people who would use the building.
A building, he discovered, had to be more than beautiful. It had to stand.
His life was interrupted by the violence of the twentieth century. He was arrested under Soviet rule, and during the Nazi occupation he was imprisoned after helping Jews.
In this dark period, the bridges he had imagined as a boy became real in another way. He helped people in danger, even when doing so placed him at risk.
Later, Lithuania recognised his life-saving efforts.
The architect who had once drawn plans for buildings had also helped people find a way through a world falling apart.
Chapter 5. The Flag That Crossed the Borders
Klaudij lived through revolutions, changing borders, occupations, and political repression.
He died in Kaunas in 1959, before he could see the white-red-white flag become the state flag of independent Belarus in 1991.
Yet his work survived.
The flag continued to be remembered as a symbol of Belarusian national identity and the aspiration for self-determination.
His architectural legacy remained part of Kaunas. His political life remained connected to the Belarusian national movement. His family history continued to reflect the intertwined cultures of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
In the fairy tale, an old notebook lay forgotten on a shelf.
One day, a child opened it and found three painted stripes: white, red, and white.
“Which country does this belong to?” the child asked.
An older visitor answered, “It tells the story of Belarusian hopes. But the life of the man who designed it crossed many borders.”
The child looked at the stripes again.
They were simple, but the story behind them was not.
There were Belarusian meetings, Lithuanian buildings, Polish family memories, arguments about alliances, and people who tried to protect one another during dangerous times.
The child understood that a person's life could be connected to several histories without making those histories identical.
Outside, the city carried on with its ordinary sounds: footsteps, bicycle bells, voices, and the distant rumble of a tram.
The notebook closed.
The flag remained.
And somewhere, in a city built from many histories, a new architect began to draw a bridge.