Eritrea Emoji & Symbols

The Eritrea flag emoji 🇪🇷 shows a red triangle reaching from the hoist across the whole flag, splitting it into a green upper triangle and a blue lower one; in the red stands a gold olive branch inside a gold olive wreath. Green stands for the farmland and herds, blue for the Red Sea, red for the blood shed in the long war of independence, and the olive 🫒 for peace. Like every country flag emoji it is two regional indicator letters, 🇪 and 🇷, for the country code ER; phones and Macs join them into a flag, while Windows shows the two letters.

The olive is older than the country. While Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia under a UN arrangement in the 1950s, it had its own flag: light blue, the colour of the United Nations, with a green olive branch in a green olive wreath. That federation flag, the one people look up as the old or 1961 flag of Eritrea, was lowered when Ethiopia annexed Eritrea in 1962. The liberation movement's red, green and blue flag carried a star; at independence the star gave way to the gold olive emblem of the old blue flag.

The coat of arms shows a camel 🐪 in the desert, framed by an olive wreath, over a ribbon reading State of Eritrea in Tigrinya, English and Arabic: ሃገረ ኤርትራ, State of Eritrea, دولة إريتريا. The camel honours the animal that carried food, water and weapons for the fighters through the years of the war, so 🐪🫒 is the emblem in two emoji. 🩴 is the shida, the cheap plastic sandal the fighters wore through mountains and desert; Asmara has a monument of a giant pair of them, and Eritreans post 🩴 with pride.

Eritrean holidays: Independence Day 🎉, Meskel 🔥, Timket ☂️ and Eid 🌙

Independence Day is 24 May. On that day in 1991 the fighters entered Asmara, and on the same date in 1993, after a referendum in which voters chose independence almost unanimously, Eritrea was declared independent. 🇪🇷🎉 is what everyone sends, and the greeting is ርሑስ በዓል ናጽነት (ruhus be'al natsnet), happy Independence Day. Martyrs' Day, 20 June, remembers those who died in the war, and 🕯️🇪🇷 is the quiet way to mark it. 1 September marks the first shots of the armed struggle in 1961, and in February the Fenkil celebrations in Massawa recall the battle for the port in 1990.

Eritreans are roughly evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, and the big feasts of both are public holidays. Most Christians belong to the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, which keeps the Ge'ez calendar: Meskel, the finding of the True Cross, falls on 27 September (28 in a leap year) and is celebrated with a great bonfire, the demera, so ✝️🔥 is the Meskel message. Timket, Epiphany, on 19 January (20 in a leap year), brings processions of priests under embroidered ceremonial umbrellas ☂️; Christmas (Lidet) is on 7 January. Catholic and Lutheran Eritreans keep their own calendars. Muslims send 🌙🕌 or ☪️ for Eid al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan and for Eid al-Adha.

The Ge'ez New Year, 11 September (12 before a Gregorian leap year), is greeted with ርሑስ ሓድሽ ዓመት (ruhus hadish amet), happy new year, while the state counts its years by the Gregorian calendar.

Eritrean food emoji: coffee ceremony ☕🫖🍿, injera 🫓 and zigni 🍲

The coffee ceremony is the heart of Eritrean hospitality. Green beans are roasted in a pan over coals, passed round so guests can smell the smoke, ground, and boiled in a jebena, a round clay pot with a long neck (🏺 or 🫖 stand in for it), while frankincense burns nearby. Coffee is served in small handleless cups, with popcorn 🍿 or roasted barley on the side, in three rounds: awel, kalaay and bereka, the last one the blessing. ☕🫖🍿 is how Eritreans write it, and a guest is expected to stay for all three.

Meals are eaten by hand from a shared platter of injera 🫓, the large spongy sour flatbread of teff or other grains, called taita in Tigrinya. On it go stews 🍲: zigni, meat cooked with the red chilli spice mix berbere 🌶️, and shiro, a smooth stew of ground chickpeas, the everyday dish of fasting days, when Orthodox Christians eat no meat or dairy. Ful 🫘, mashed fava beans with bread, is the classic café breakfast.

Italian rule left Eritrea with pasta 🍝, pizza 🍕, cappuccino and macchiato in every Asmara bar, and Asmara Beer 🍺 brewed in the city since the colonial era. In the highland summer, street sellers peel beles, the fruit of the prickly pear cactus 🌵, and down on the coast Massawa is known for its fish 🐟.

Asmara 🌴, the Red Sea 🌊 and Eritrean landscapes

Asmara, the capital, sits on the highland plateau at about 2,300 metres. Much of it was built by Italian architects in the 1930s, in Art Deco, Futurist and modernist styles, and in 2017 UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site, Asmara: A Modernist African City. Its landmarks have their own emoji shorthand: 🌴 for the palm-lined Harnet Avenue, where people stroll in the evening; ✈️ for the Fiat Tagliero service station of 1938, built in the shape of an aeroplane with long concrete wings and no pillars beneath them; 🎬 for Cinema Impero. 🚂 is the Eritrean Railway, which winds down from Asmara through tunnels and over bridges towards Massawa, kept alive by veteran railwaymen and their restored steam locomotives.

East of the highlands ⛰️ the land drops to the Red Sea coast 🌊, more than a thousand kilometres long. Massawa, the old port ⚓🚢 with its coral-stone houses, looks out on the Dahlak Archipelago 🏝️, a scatter of low islands with coral reefs 🪸, reef fish 🐠 and sea turtles 🐢, a quiet diving 🤿 ground. To the south, the Danakil lowlands of the Afar people are some of the hottest places on Earth 🏜️, and volcanoes 🌋 run through them; Nabro erupted in 2011. Goats 🐐 and donkeys 🫏 are everywhere, hamadryas baboons 🐒 live on the escarpment, and a small herd of elephants 🐘 survives in the western lowlands of Gash-Barka.

Eritrea cycling 🚴, running 🏃 and guayla dance 💃🕺

Cycling is Eritrea's national passion, another Italian legacy: the Tour of Eritrea dates back to 1946, and on race days Asmara's streets fill with crowds. In 2015 Daniel Teklehaimanot became the first African rider to wear the polka-dot jersey of the Tour de France, and in 2024 Biniam Girmay became the first Black African to win a Tour de France stage, winning two more and the green points jersey 🏆. 🚴🇪🇷 is the fans' cheer; 🚴💚 when Girmay is in green. Eritrean runners 🏃 are famous too: Zersenay Tadese set the half-marathon world record in 2010, and Ghirmay Ghebreslassie won the world marathon title in 2015 at 19.

At weddings and feasts people dance guayla 💃🕺, moving in a circle with rhythmic shoulder steps to the kebero drum 🥁 and the krar, a five- or six-string lyre that has no emoji (🪕 or 🎶 stand in). Women dress for the occasion in the zuria 👗, a white cotton dress with a woven coloured border called tilet, with a matching netsela shawl 🧣; 🧕 suits many Muslim women. Eritrea's nine officially recognised peoples, the Tigrinya, Tigre, Saho, Afar, Bilen, Kunama, Nara, Hedareb and Rashaida, each have their own songs and dances.

Tigrinya letters, Ge'ez numerals and the Eritrean nakfa

Tigrinya, the most spoken language of Eritrea (about 3.8 million speakers in Eritrea by CLDR estimates), and Tigre are written in the Ge'ez script, or fidel, the same script as Amharic in Ethiopia. Every character is a syllable: a consonant shape changed by a small stroke, ring or bend for one of seven vowels. ለ is lä, ሉ lu, ሊ li, ላ la, ሌ le, ል lə (or l with no vowel) and ሎ lo. The grid gives the first form of each of the 35 consonants of Tigrinya, from ሀ to ፐ, plus the seven forms of ለ and the word ኤርትራ, Ertra, Eritrea. Every form of every letter is in the Tigrinya Letters collection, and Tigre has its own.

In Tigrinya, ሐ and ዐ are real throat sounds, and ቐ, a soft rasping q, is a letter of its own, found in the everyday word የቐንየለይ (yeqenyeley), thank you. ሠ, ኀ and ፀ sound the same as ሰ, ሐ and ጸ and survive in traditional spellings. The script has its own punctuation: ፡ was once the word separator (today a space does the job), ። is the full stop, ፣ the comma and ፤ the semicolon. Ge'ez numerals ፩ ፪ ፫ … ፲ appear in church calendars and on formal documents; they have no zero, and everyday writing uses 1 2 3. To type them, Windows 10 and later offer a Tigrinya keyboard, phone keyboards such as Gboard have Tigrinya, and you can always copy from the grid.

Arabic and English are also de facto working languages of the state, and Saho and Afar are written in Latin letters; their collections, Arabic, Saho and Afar, cover their letters. The currency is the nakfa, introduced in 1997 to replace the Ethiopian birr and named after the town of Nakfa, the mountain stronghold of the independence fighters. It has no Unicode sign; prices are written Nfk 100 or 100 ERN, the ISO code. Ethiopia, which shares the Ge'ez script, the coffee ceremony and injera with Eritrea, has its own Ethiopia emoji collection.