Croatia Emoji & Symbols

🇭🇷 the Croatian flag goes in bios, match-day messages and holiday photos, and its colours turn into hearts as ❤️🤍💙. Football fans add the chequered shirt of the national team, the kockice, with 🟥⬜, since Unicode has no red-and-white chessboard. ⚽ is the national passion: the team, nicknamed the Vatreni (the Blazers), finished third at the 1998 World Cup, reached the final in 2018 🥈 and won bronze again in 2022 🥉, and Luka Modrić won the Ballon d'Or in 2018.

👔 is a Croatian emoji more than most people know. The word cravat comes from the French cravate, from Croate: in the 17th century Croatian soldiers serving in France wore knotted scarves at the neck, and Paris copied them. Croatia celebrates Cravat Day, Dan kravate, on 18 October. 🐕 can stand in for a Dalmatian, named after Dalmatia, the long coastal region of Croatia, which is the breed's officially recognised home.

🏝️🏖️🌊⛵ is the Adriatic coast: more than a thousand islands, islets and reefs, from Krk and Cres in the north to Hvar, Brač, Vis, Korčula and Mljet in the south, with ferries ⛴️ linking the inhabited ones to the mainland. 🏰 is Dubrovnik, whose old town is wrapped in nearly two kilometres of medieval walls. Neighbours have collections too: see Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Hungary and, across the Adriatic, Italy.

Croatian flag emoji: copy and paste 🇭🇷, and the šahovnica

The Croatian flag emoji is not one stored picture. It is two regional indicator letters, 🇭 and 🇷, the country code HR (for Hrvatska, Croatia's own name), which phones and Macs draw as the flag. Windows has no country flag pictures in its emoji font, so on a Windows PC the same emoji shows as the letters HR; the person reading it on a phone still sees the flag. On Discord you can type :flag_hr:; on Slack, :flag-hr:.

The flag is a red, white and blue tricolour with the coat of arms in the middle, adopted on 21 December 1990. The shield is the šahovnica, a chequerboard of 25 red and white squares that starts with a red one in the top left corner. Above it sits a crown of five small shields, for the oldest known Croatian arms, Dubrovnik, Dalmatia, Istria and Slavonia. The red-and-white squares are Croatia's most recognisable symbol: on football shirts, in the roof tiles of St Mark's Church in Zagreb, and behind the map of Croatia on the Croatian 2 euro coin.

People who search for ancient Croatian symbols usually mean the šahovnica, the pleter, a three-strand stone interlace carved on early medieval churches, and the Glagolitic script, Croatia's oldest alphabet, which has its own Unicode letters: Hrvatska is written Ⱈⱃⰲⰰⱅⱄⰽⰰ. Unicode encodes the letters, not their style, so most fonts draw the round early form rather than the transitional form seen on the Baška Tablet of around 1100.

Croatian food emoji: oysters, pršut and peka

There is no peka emoji, so people use 🥘 or 🐙🔥: peka is meat or octopus slow-baked with potatoes under an iron bell lid heaped with embers, the dish every Dalmatian konoba is proud of. The coast eats from the sea: 🦪 oysters from the bay of Mali Ston, 🐟 grilled fish with blitva, 🦐 scampi na buzaru in wine and garlic, 🦞 lobster, and 🍚 for crni rižot, black risotto coloured with cuttlefish ink. 🧂 fits the salt pans of Ston and Nin, worked since the Middle Ages.

🥓 is the closest emoji to pršut, the air-dried ham of Dalmatia and Istria, served with 🧀 Paški sir, the sharp sheep's cheese from the island of Pag. 🫒 is Istrian and Dalmatian olive oil, 🍄 stands in for the truffles of inland Istria, 🍊 for the mandarins of the Neretva valley and 🍒 for the Marasca cherry of Zadar, from which maraschino liqueur is made. 🥧 is burek and Zagorje's štrukli, 🍩 the small Christmas doughnuts called fritule, and 🍫 Kraš of Zagreb, maker of Bajadera.

To drink: 🍷🍇 for Plavac Mali from Pelješac, Graševina from Slavonia and Malvazija from Istria, 🥃 for rakija, from herbal travarica to plum šljivovica, and 🍺 for Ožujsko and Karlovačko. ☕ is a way of life: "Idemo na kavu?" (shall we go for a coffee?) means an hour or two on a terrace, not a quick espresso.

Dubrovnik, Split, Zagreb and nature emoji

🏰🐉👑 is Dubrovnik twice over: the walled old town UNESCO listed in 1979, and King's Landing in Game of Thrones, much of which was filmed there; the cable car 🚠 climbs Mount Srđ above it. 🏛️ is Diocletian's Palace in Split, built for the Roman emperor around 300 AD and still lived in, with shops and flats inside its walls, and 🏟️ the Roman amphitheatre of Pula, one of the best preserved anywhere, which still hosts concerts and the Pula Film Festival. 🌅 is Zadar at sundown, where the Sea Organ plays as waves push air through pipes under the stone steps; the line that Zadar has the world's most beautiful sunset is attributed to Alfred Hitchcock.

In Zagreb, 🚋 stands for the blue trams and ⛪ for the cathedral and St Mark's Church with its chequered roof; in December the city's Advent market fills the squares. Inland, 🏞️ is Plitvice Lakes, sixteen terraced lakes joined by waterfalls, a national park since 1949, and ⛰️🌲 the Velebit mountain and the forests of Gorski kotar, where 🐻 brown bears and 🐺 wolves still live. 🐬 fits the bottlenose dolphins of Lošinj, and 🪻 the lavender fields of Hvar.

Croatian sports, inventions, holidays and music emoji

Beyond football, Croatia is a small country with a long medal list. 🤾 the men's handball team won Olympic gold in 1996 and 2004, 🤽 water polo won gold in 2012, and 🏀 recalls Dražen Petrović and the Olympic silver of 1992. 🎾 Goran Ivanišević won Wimbledon in 2001 as a wildcard and Marin Čilić the US Open in 2014; ⛷️ Janica Kostelić won four Olympic skiing golds, and 🚣 the Sinković brothers are Olympic rowing champions.

Croatian minds behind everyday things: ✏️🖋️ Slavoljub Penkala, who patented a mechanical pencil in Zagreb in 1906, which is why a pen is still a penkala in Croatian; 🪂 Faust Vrančić of Šibenik, who drew a parachute, the Homo Volans, in his book Machinae Novae in the early 1600s; 🫆 Ivan Vučetić, born on Hvar, who made fingerprints a police tool in Argentina; ⚡ Nikola Tesla, born in 1856 in Smiljan in Lika; and 🏎️⚡ Rimac, whose electric hypercar, the Nevera, is built near Zagreb.

Most Croatians are Catholic ✝️. 🎄 is Božić, 25 December, 🥚 the painted eggs of Uskrs, Easter, and 🕯️ All Saints' Day on 1 November, when cemeteries glow with candles. 🎭 is carnival, above all the Rijeka Carnival, with the bell-ringers of the Kastav area. 🇭🇷🎆 fits Statehood Day on 30 May and Victory Day on 5 August. 🎶 is klapa, unaccompanied Dalmatian harmony singing that UNESCO listed in 2012, and 🎤 Eurovision, where Baby Lasagna's "Rim Tim Tagi Dim" took second place in 2024, Croatia's best result.

Croatian symbols: the euro and the letters č ć đ š ž

The Croatia currency symbol is the euro sign €. Croatia replaced the kuna with the euro on 1 January 2023, at a fixed rate of 7.53450 kuna to the euro, the same day it joined the Schengen area. Croatians write the sign after the number with a decimal comma: 12,50 €. The kuna was written kn (ISO code HRK) and never had a Unicode symbol; it was named after the pine marten, whose pelts were once used as money, and the marten now appears on the Croatian 1 euro coin, while the 1, 2 and 5 cent coins carry the Glagolitic letters ⰘⰓ.

Croatian is written in a Latin alphabet of 30 letters shaped by Ljudevit Gaj in the 1830s. It adds č (a hard "ch", as in čaj, tea), ć (a softer "ch", as in kuća, house), đ (a soft "j", as in Đakovo), š ("sh", as in šuma, forest) and ž (the "s" in measure, as in žena, woman), and treats dž, lj and nj as single letters written with two characters. Each letter has one sound, so Croatian is read as it is written. The 2021 census counted 3.87 million people in Croatia, with 3.69 million reporting Croatian as their mother tongue; Italian and Venetian are also spoken in Istria.

On Windows, add the Croatian keyboard: it is QWERTZ, with Š and Đ on the keys right of P, Č and Ć right of L, and Ž next to Ć. On a Mac add the Croatian layout. On a phone, long-press c, d, s or z. In HTML, write č ć đ š ž (capitalise the first letter of the name for Č Ć Đ Š Ž). Or tap the letters above to copy them.