Greece Emoji

The Greek flag emoji 🇬🇷 shows nine horizontal stripes, blue and white in turn, with a white cross on a blue square in the top corner. A popular story links the nine stripes to the nine syllables of the revolutionary motto Ελευθερία ή Θάνατος (Freedom or Death); the colours are usually read as the sea and sky and the white of the waves, and the cross as the Orthodox faith ☦️. Flags of this design flew during the War of Independence in the 1820s, and this one has been the only national flag since 1978. The cross in the corner is a Greek cross ✚, the kind with four equal arms. To show the colours without the flag, people write 💙🤍 or build a little flag out of 🟦 and ⬜ squares (there is one in the combos below).

Like every country flag, 🇬🇷 is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇬 + 🇷 for the country code GR. iPhones, Android phones and Macs draw the pair as a flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters GR instead. The flag is still there: paste it into a message and the person on a phone sees 🇬🇷. Greece joined what is now the European Union in 1981, which is why 🇪🇺 so often sits next to 🇬🇷.

The CLDR estimate puts Greece's population at about 10.5 million, and almost all of them speak Greek, one of the oldest written languages in Europe. Many Greeks also speak English, French or German, and Pontic Greek, Macedonian, Turkish, Bulgarian and Albanian are spoken by smaller communities; each of those languages has its own collection on this site.

Greek symbols and their meanings: Acropolis, owl, olive, mati

🏛️ Classical building is the emoji for the Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens, the temple of Athena built in the 5th century BC, and for ancient Greece in general; 🏺 the painted amphora stands for Greek pottery and museums. Athena's bird is the owl 🦉: Athenian silver coins carried it, and the Greek €1 coin copies one of those ancient coins today. Ancient Greeks said that taking owls to Athens was pointless, the way English speaks of coals to Newcastle. The olive 🫒 was Athena's gift to the city in the myth, olive wreaths crowned the winners at ancient Olympia, and olive groves still cover much of the country.

The mati (μάτι, "eye") is the blue glass eye that protects against the evil eye, the harm that envy and too much praise are believed to bring. You see it on bracelets, over doorways, in cars and pinned to baby clothes. Unicode calls the emoji 🧿 nazar amulet, its Turkish name, but it is the same charm, and Greeks send 🧿 after a compliment, often with a playful φτου φτου ("ftou ftou", a mock spit to keep bad luck away). The komboloi 📿, worry beads clicked through the fingers in cafés and on benches, is a pastime rather than a prayer tool; the Orthodox prayer rope is a separate thing, the komboskini.

People searching for "greek symbols" often mean the symbols of the gods and of ancient Greece. ⚡ is the thunderbolt of Zeus, 🔱 the trident of Poseidon, 🪉 stands in for Apollo's lyre, 🍇🍷 belong to Dionysus, and 🛡️ is the round shield of the hoplites and Spartans. ⚕️ is the rod of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, with one snake; ⚚ is the winged staff of Hermes with two snakes, often used for medicine by mistake. 🎭 the comedy and tragedy masks come from Greek theatre, which is still played in summer in the ancient theatre of Epidaurus. For the letters themselves as maths and science symbols (π Σ Δ Ω), see the Greek Letters collection.

Greece emoji for food and drink

The Greek salad is horiatiki 🥗, "village salad": tomato 🍅, cucumber 🥒, onion, olives 🫒 and a slab of feta 🧀 with oregano 🌿 and olive oil, and no lettuce. Feta has been a protected Greek product in the EU since 2002. Tzatziki is yogurt, cucumber 🥒 and garlic 🧄, and almost everything off the grill gets a squeeze of lemon 🍋.

Souvlaki and gyros wrapped in pita are what 🥙 means in Greece, usually with tomato, onion, tzatziki and a few chips tucked inside. 🍖 is the lamb roasted on a spit at Easter. Moussaka layers aubergine 🍆 with minced meat and béchamel, and spanakopita 🥧 is the spinach and feta pie in crisp filo. By the sea the meze is grilled octopus 🐙 drying on a line outside the taverna, fried kalamari 🦑 and fresh fish 🐟. Thick Greek yogurt 🥣 with thyme honey 🍯 is breakfast and dessert at once.

To drink: wine 🍷 from grapes 🍇 grown since antiquity, ouzo and tsipouro 🥃 (ouzo turns milky white when you add water), and coffee in every form. Greek coffee ☕ is boiled in a small briki and served with the grounds; the frappé 🥤, iced instant coffee shaken into a foam, is said to have been invented at the Thessaloniki fair in 1957, and freddo espresso is its modern rival. The toast is Γεια μας! ("to our health").

Greek holidays and the emoji people send

Easter (Πάσχα) is the biggest feast of the year, and it follows the Orthodox calendar, so it often falls on a different Sunday from Western Easter. Eggs 🥚 are dyed deep red 🔴 on Holy Thursday. Just before midnight on Holy Saturday the lights in the church go out, the priest brings out the flame, and it passes from candle to candle 🕯️ through the crowd; at midnight he sings Χριστός Ανέστη! (Christ is risen) and everyone answers Αληθώς Ανέστη! (Truly he is risen) as the bells ring and fireworks 🎆 go up. On Sunday the lamb 🐑 turns on the spit and families crack red eggs against each other; whoever's egg survives wins. The usual message is Χριστός Ανέστη! 🕯️🥚 or Καλό Πάσχα!

Clean Monday (Καθαρά Δευτέρα) opens Lent with a picnic and kites 🪁: on that day the sky over hills and beaches fills with them, most famously on Filopappou Hill opposite the Acropolis. Before it comes Apokries, the carnival season, with masks 🎭 and the big parade in Patras. On 25 March Greeks mark the start of the War of Independence in 1821 with parades and flags 🇬🇷, and on 28 October, Ohi Day, the "No" (Όχι) that Greece answered to Mussolini's ultimatum in 1940.

Name days matter as much as birthdays: on the feast of the saint you are named after, friends call, visit and post Χρόνια πολλά! ("many years") 🎉, the wish Greeks use for birthdays and holidays too. At Christmas, children go door to door singing the kalanta, and on the islands people decorate a little boat ⛵ as well as a tree. On New Year's Day the family cuts the vasilopita, a cake with a coin 🪙 baked inside, and whoever finds it has luck for the year.

Greece emoji for islands, summer, nature and sports

Greece has thousands of islands and islets, only a couple of hundred of them inhabited, and summer there is 🏝️🏖️☀️🌊. Ferries ⛴️ link them to Piraeus and to each other, and island hopping by ferry is how many people travel. ⛪ with 🌅 is the Cyclades in two emoji: whitewashed churches with blue domes above the sea, and the sunset over the caldera of Santorini, the flooded crater of a volcano 🌋 that erupted in the Bronze Age. ⛰️ is Mount Olympus, the highest mountain in Greece and the home of the gods.

The animals people send are the island cats 🐈 that sleep on every taverna chair, the donkeys 🫏 that still carry loads on Hydra, where cars are not allowed, goats 🐐 on Cretan hillsides, dolphins 🐬 in the Aegean and the loggerhead sea turtles 🐢 that lay their eggs on the beaches of Zakynthos. For music, there is no bouzouki emoji, so 🪕 stands in for it; 💃🕺 are the circle dances at every wedding and village festival, and the sirtaki, a dance made up for the 1964 film Zorba the Greek.

In sport, Greece won Euro 2004 ⚽🏆, beating hosts Portugal 1–0 in the final. Basketball 🏀 is just as loved: Greece won EuroBasket in 1987 and 2005, and Giannis Antetokounmpo won the NBA title with Milwaukee in 2021. Greek water polo teams 🤽 win Olympic medals, and Stefanos Tsitsipas and Maria Sakkari brought tennis 🎾 into Greek homes. The Olympics began at Olympia, and the Olympic flame 🔥 is still lit there from the sun's rays before every Games; Athens held the first modern Olympics in 1896 and again in 2004 🏅, in the marble Panathenaic Stadium 🏟️ and beyond, and the marathon 🏃 is named after the run from Marathon to Athens.

Greek letters copy and paste: the alphabet, accents and the euro sign €

The Greek alphabet has 24 letters, from Α α (alpha) to Ω ω (omega); our word alphabet is simply alpha + beta. Sigma has two small forms: σ inside a word and ς at the end, as in σοφός. Since 1982 Greek has been written in the monotonic system, with just two marks. The tonos ΄ shows the stressed syllable and goes on the seven vowels ά έ ή ί ό ύ ώ (Ά Έ Ή Ί Ό Ύ Ώ); it tells words apart, as in πότε (when?) and ποτέ (never). The dialytika ¨ on ϊ and ϋ says the two vowels are spoken separately: παϊδάκια (lamb chops) against παιδάκια (little children). ΐ and ΰ carry both marks. Words written all in capitals drop the tonos but keep the dialytika.

Greek punctuation has two surprises. The Greek question mark is ;, the shape English uses for a semicolon, and the job of the semicolon is done by the raised dot · (ano teleia). Quotations go in guillemets « », as in «Καλημέρα».

To type Greek on a computer, add the Greek keyboard (Windows: Settings → Time & language → Language & region on Windows 11 or Language on Windows 10; Mac: System Settings → Keyboard → Text Input → Edit) and switch with Win+Space or Ctrl+Space. On the Greek layout the key to the right of L is a dead key: press it, then a vowel, to get ά; with Shift it gives the dialytika for ϊ. Q types ; and W types ς. On phones, add the Greek keyboard; it has the accent key and long-press options for the accented vowels. In HTML, α Ω and ς (ς) work. Greece adopted the euro in 2001, and euro cash arrived in 2002; the sign follows the amount with a decimal comma: 2,50 €. The old drachma, a currency name that goes back to ancient Greece, has its own sign ₯ in Unicode, though in daily life it was written δρχ.