Belarus Emoji

The Belarus flag emoji 🇧🇾 shows the state flag: a wide red band over a narrower green one, with a white strip at the hoist carrying a red ornament taken from the embroidered towels (rushniki) of Belarusian folk art. It was adopted after the 1995 referendum. People who want the colours without the flag line up ❤️💚 or 🟥🟩.

Like every country flag, 🇧🇾 is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇧 + 🇾 for the country code BY. Phones and Macs draw the pair as a flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters BY instead, but the person you send it to on a phone still sees 🇧🇾.

Many searches are for the white-red-white flag emoji, and there is none: 🇧🇾 represents Belarus’s state flag, and Unicode has no white-red-white flag sequence for Belarus. The white-red-white flag was used by the Belarusian People's Republic in 1918 and was the national flag of the Republic of Belarus from 1991 to 1995. In 2020, after the disputed presidential election, it became the flag of the protest movement, and it is still flown by the opposition and the diaspora; inside Belarus people have been fined and jailed for displaying it. Online it is written as 🤍❤️🤍, or as ⬜ 🟥 ⬜ stacked one per line, which is what "free Belarus" posts use.

Belarus emoji for food: bulba, draniki and the forest

The potato, bulba in Belarusian, is the heart of the national kitchen, and 🥔 is the most Belarusian food emoji there is. 🥔🥞 together mean draniki, pancakes of grated potato fried until crisp and served with sour cream 🥛. 🥧 stands for babka, a baked potato pudding with bacon and onion, and 🥟 for kalduny, potato dumplings with a meat filling.

🍲 is machanka, a thick pork and sausage stew that pancakes are dipped into, and 🫜, the root vegetable, is the beetroot behind khaladnik, the cold pink soup of summer. 🥓 is salo, cured pork fat eaten on dark rye bread 🍞, and 🥒 the pickled cucumbers on every holiday table.

In late summer and autumn much of the country goes into the woods: 🍄 for mushroom picking and 🫐 for bilberries and cranberries from the bogs. 🍎 covers the apples of village orchards, 🍯 the honey, and 🍯🥃 together krambambula, an old honey and spice liqueur.

Belarus symbols: castles, bison, lakes and forests

🏰 is first of all Mir Castle and the Radziwiłł palace at Nesvizh, both on UNESCO's World Heritage list. ⛪ covers the churches of every town; most believers are Orthodox ☦️ and a large minority Catholic ✝️, and the Cathedral of Saint Sophia in Polotsk dates back to the 11th century.

🦬 the European bison (zubr) is the animal Belarusians count as their own. It lives wild in the Białowieża Forest (Belavezhskaya Pushcha), an ancient woodland shared with Poland and protected by UNESCO, together with deer 🦌, wild boar 🐗, wolves 🐺 and beavers 🦫. 🌾 represents grain from the fields and the golden ears that frame the national emblem; Belarusian craftspeople weave straw into figures and ornaments.

Belarus is often called the land of lakes, with thousands of them; Naroch is the largest, and the Braslav lakes in the north are a favourite for canoeing 🛶 and fishing 🎣. 🌲🌳 are the pine and birch forests that cover a large part of the country. In Minsk 🏙️ there is the metro 🚇 and the National Library, a glass building in the shape of a cut gem that locals call the diamond 💎📚.

Made in Belarus, and Belarus in sport

🚜 is the Minsk Tractor Works, whose tractors are sold around the world under the name BELARUS, and 🚛 is BelAZ, the maker of giant mining dump trucks; its BelAZ 75710 holds the record as the largest-capacity dump truck ever built. 🏭 stands for the factories behind them.

Ice hockey 🏒 is one of the most popular sports, and Minsk hosted the 2014 World Championship. In tennis 🎾 Victoria Azarenka and Aryna Sabalenka both reached world number one and won Grand Slam titles. Biathlon 🎿🎯 made Darya Domracheva a national hero with three Olympic golds in Sochi in 2014; weightlifting 🏋️ and football ⚽ add more medals 🥇 and fans.

Belarusian holidays and the emoji people send

Kaliady is the winter season of carols: carollers go from house to house with a star on a pole 🌟, and one of them is often dressed as a goat 🐐. Belarus keeps two Christmas days, Catholic on 25 December and Orthodox on 7 January, and the New Year tree 🎄 belongs to 31 December. The Easter eggs 🥚 of Vialikdzen are dyed with onion skins, and the candles 🕯️ of Radunitsa, a public holiday nine days after Orthodox Easter, and of Dziady on 2 November are lit for the dead.

Kupalle, on the night of 6 to 7 July, is the old midsummer feast: people jump over bonfires 🔥, girls float flower wreaths 💐 on the river, and the brave look in the forest for the fern flower 🌿 that blooms, the legend says, only that night. Independence Day on 3 July marks the liberation of Minsk in 1944 and ends with fireworks 🎆; on Victory Day, 9 May, medals 🎖️ and candles honour the war dead, a loss felt in almost every family.

🧵🪡 stand for embroidery: the red-on-white patterns of rushniki and shirts are the best-known Belarusian design, the same one that runs down the flag.

How to type Belarusian letters Ў ў І і and the ruble

Belarusian is written in a Cyrillic alphabet of 32 letters. Its distinctive letters are І і, Ў ў, the "short u" that sounds like the w in English how (воўк "wolf"), and the apostrophe ʼ (зʼесці "to eat up"), and it writes шч as two letters. Spelling follows pronunciation, so an unstressed o is written a: Масква. Russian, which has its own letters collection on this site, writes И, Щ and the hard sign Ъ, and spells these words волк, съесть and Москва.

Windows and macOS have a Belarusian keyboard layout, and so do phone keyboards such as Gboard. Its keys match the Russian layout except three: І, Ў and the apostrophe sit where Russian has И, Щ and Ъ. Without it, type 040E and then Alt+X in Word for Ў (045E for ў, 0406 for І, 0456 for і), use the HTML entities Ў and ў, or copy them from this page.

Belarusian has also been written in a Latin alphabet, Łacinka, with the letters Ć Č Ł Ń Ś Š Ŭ Ź Ž; Ŭ is the twin of Ў. It is still seen in some publications and in the romanized place names (Niasviž, Navahrudak) used on maps and signs.

The currency is the Belarusian ruble (code BYN). Its official graphic sign, approved in 2026, is a Cyrillic Б with a horizontal bar. Unicode has provisionally assigned U+20C5 to it, but it is not in a published Unicode version yet; write BYN or руб. in copyable text. The ₽ sign belongs to the Russian ruble. In 2016 four zeros were dropped, and coins 🪙 came into use for the first time. The first Belarusian ruble notes of 1992 showed animals, a hare 🐇 on the one-ruble note, and the currency is still nicknamed zaichyk, "bunny".