During the independence war from 1821, the Greek rebel troups used a blue and white horizontally striped flag at sea and a flag with a white cross on a blue base on land. The flag with the cross was used after independence in 1829, but the current one was made official in 1978. The blue and white streaks express the motto during the independence war "Freedom or death", and the white cross is derived from the flag that Patriarch Germanus used when he called for a revolt in the City Rabat in the northeastern Peloponnese Peninsula.