Above the eagle, is a crown, and the background colour of the flag is
yellow or gold. This flag is often used also by the Greek Orthodox
Churches in the diaspora under the Patriarchate as their official flag
(such as in America, Canada, Australia, etc), and is not to be confused
with the double-headed eagle used by the Church of Greece. Having said
that, many monasteries and churches in Greece do currently fly this golden/yellow flag, for historical reasons.
The yellow with a black crowned double-headed eagle flag, was the symbol of the Paleologues, the last Greek-speaking “Roman” (i.e. Byzantine) dynasty to rule from
Constantinople. Emperor Michael VIII Paliologos recaptured
Constantinople from the Crusaders in 1261, from a state based in Asia
Minor; the double-headed eagle symbolized the dynasty’s interests in
both Asia and Europe, and was kept despite the fact that virtually all
of the Asian possessions were gobbled up by the Ottomans within a
generation of the recapture of the City. Michael’s descendants stayed on
the Byzantine throne until the City and the Empire fell to the Ottomans
in 1453.
This flag had in the two centuries of Paleologan rule become identified not just with the dynasty but with the Empire
itself and, more generally, with institutions and cultural ideas outside
the Byzantine Empire that still remained centered on Constantinople.
Emperor Isaakios Comnenos (11th century AD), the first ruling member of the Comnenus dynasty, was the first Emperor who adopted the two headed eagle as the symbol of the Empire which comes from the single headed imperial eagle motif, traditional for the Roman Empire.
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