Lithuania Emoji

The Lithuania flag emoji 🇱🇹 is a tricolour of yellow, green and red stripes. It was adopted in 1918, when the modern state was founded, banned under Soviet rule, and raised again during the Singing Revolution of 1988; it became the state flag once more when Lithuania restored its independence on 11 March 1990. The colours are usually read as yellow for the sun and prosperity, green for the forests, life and hope, and red for the blood shed for the country and for courage. People who want the colours without the flag type 💛💚❤️ or stack 🟨🟩🟥 one per line to build the stripes.

Like every country flag, 🇱🇹 is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇱 + 🇹 for the country code LT. Phones and Macs draw the pair as a flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters LT instead, but the person you send it to on a phone still sees 🇱🇹. Lithuania has been in the European Union since 2004, so 🇱🇹🇪🇺 is a common pair in bios.

Lithuania also has a historical state flag: the white knight Vytis galloping on a red field, the same figure as on the coat of arms. There is no emoji for it, so people write it as 🐎🗡️🛡️. The double cross on the knight's shield, often called the Cross of Jogaila, comes closest to ☨, the Cross of Lorraine, in Unicode. Searches for a "Poland Lithuania flag emoji" are about the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth of 1569–1795, which has no emoji either; people pair 🇵🇱🇱🇹 instead.

Lithuania symbols and their meanings: Vytis, the iron wolf and the oak

🐎🗡️🛡️ Vytis, the armoured rider with a raised sword, has been the emblem of the grand dukes since the Middle Ages and is on Lithuania's euro coins 🪙 today. 👑 recalls Mindaugas, crowned in 1253 as the only king Lithuania ever had; the day of his coronation, 6 July, is now Statehood Day.

🐺 The iron wolf comes from the founding legend of Vilnius: Grand Duke Gediminas dreamt of an iron wolf howling on a hill, and the pagan priest Lizdeika told him it meant a great city should be built there. Gediminas' Tower 🏰 still stands on that hill above the Old Town, and the iron wolf gives its name to an army brigade.

🌳 The oak (ąžuolas) is the national tree, sacred to the thunder god Perkūnas; the Stelmužė oak in the northeast is counted among the oldest trees in Europe. 🌿 stands for rue (rūta), the national flower, the herb of bridal wreaths. The national bird is the white stork, whose huge nests sit on farm poles and chimneys all over the country; there is no stork emoji yet, so people simply name it.

Searches for Lithuanian pagan symbols lead to the old Baltic faith, kept longer than anywhere else in Europe: Lithuania was baptised only in 1387. Its signs are the sun ☀️, carved on crosses and roof gables, Perkūnas and his thunder ⚡, and the grass snake 🐍 (žaltys), once kept as a guardian of the house and still a lucky motif in folk art.

Basketball 🏀: Lithuania's second religion

No emoji says Lithuania like 🏀. Basketball is called the country's second religion, and on match nights the whole nation watches. Lithuania won the European championship in 1937, 1939 and 2003, and Olympic bronze in 1992, 1996 and 2000. The 1992 team wore tie-dye warm-up shirts with a dunking skeleton in Barcelona, donated by the Grateful Dead; Arvydas Sabonis and Šarūnas Marčiulionis were its stars.

⚔️ belongs here too: Žalgiris, the name of the great Kaunas club, is the Lithuanian name of the Battle of Grunwald of 1410, where Lithuanian and Polish armies defeated the Teutonic Order. Fans write 💚🏀 for Žalgiris and 🇱🇹🏀💪 for the national team.

Other sports bring medals 🥇 too: Virgilijus Alekna won Olympic discus gold in 2000 and 2004, and his son Mykolas set the discus world record in 2024; Rūta Meilutytė 🏊 won Olympic breaststroke gold in London at 15; Žydrūnas Savickas 🏋️ won the World's Strongest Man four times.

Lithuanian food emoji: cepelinai, šaltibarščiai and dark rye

🥔🥟 Cepelinai are the national dish: big dumplings of grated potato filled with minced meat or curd cheese, served with sour cream 🥛 and fried bacon bits 🥓. They are named after the Zeppelin airships they resemble. Potatoes also go into kugelis, a baked potato pudding, into potato pancakes 🥞 and into vėdarai, potato sausage 🌭.

🫜🥣 Šaltibarščiai is cold beetroot soup made with kefir, cucumber 🥒 and dill, so bright pink that it has become a summer meme, eaten with hot boiled potatoes on the side. Dark rye bread 🍞 is on every table; cut into strips, fried and rubbed with garlic 🧄 it becomes kepta duona, the standard snack with beer 🍺. Fresh cucumber dipped in honey 🍯 is an old summer treat, and curd cheese 🧀 shows up from breakfast to dessert.

🎂 on a Lithuanian table is often šakotis, the "tree cake" baked on a turning spit until it grows branches of dough. In Trakai the Karaim community bakes kibinai 🥟, half-moon pastries with meat. Late summer sends families into the forest for mushrooms 🍄 and bilberries 🫐; the town of Varėna even holds a mushroom festival. 🍎 covers the apples of village orchards, and 🐟 the herring and smoked fish of the coast.

Lithuania emoji for places: castles, crosses, dunes and lakes

🏰 is Trakai Island Castle, red brick on an island in Lake Galvė, and Gediminas' Tower in Vilnius. The Old Town of Vilnius, with its baroque churches ⛪ and cathedral, is on UNESCO's World Heritage list, and it is one of the few capitals where hot-air balloons 🎈 float over the roofs on summer evenings. Most Lithuanians are Catholic ✝️, and the Hill of Crosses near Šiauliai holds many thousands of crosses left by pilgrims; Soviet authorities bulldozed it more than once and people brought the crosses back. ✡️ recalls the Litvak Jewish heritage of Vilnius, once called the Jerusalem of Lithuania.

The Baltic coast 🌊 runs to the beach resort of Palanga 🏖️ and the port of Klaipėda ⚓⛴️. South of it the Curonian Spit, a thin strip of sand shared with Russia and also a UNESCO site, has dunes so high that Lithuanians call them their Sahara 🏜️. Inland, the lakes and rivers of Aukštaitija National Park 🏞️ are made for canoeing 🛶, and pine forests 🌲 hide deer 🦌, moose 🫎, wild boar 🐗 and beavers 🦫.

Lithuanian holidays, letters and the emoji people send

Lithuania marks two independence days: 16 February, the Act of 1918, and 11 March, the restoration of 1990, when it was the first Soviet republic to declare independence. On 6 July, Statehood Day, Lithuanians at home and abroad sing the national anthem together at 9 pm Lithuanian time. On 23 August 1989 about two million people joined hands 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 in the Baltic Way, a human chain through Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia; the song festivals 🎶🎤 shared with Latvia and Estonia are on UNESCO's intangible heritage list.

Joninės (also called Rasos) on the night of 23 to 24 June is midsummer: bonfires 🔥, flower and oak-leaf wreaths 🌼 and the search for the fern flower. Užgavėnės, before Lent, drives winter out with masks 👹🎭, pancakes 🥞 and the burning of the straw figure Morė. On Christmas Eve, Kūčios, families share twelve meatless dishes with herring and little kūčiukai biscuits 🍪 over hay 🌾 laid under the tablecloth; Easter brings decorated eggs, margučiai 🥚, and the Kaziukas fair in Vilnius in March sells verbos 💐, bundles of dried flowers. On 1 November, All Saints’ Day, and on 2 November, Vėlinės, cemeteries glow with candles 🕯️.

The Lithuanian letters beyond A–Z are Ą Č Ę Ė Į Š Ų Ū Ž. The ogonek in ą ę į ų once marked nasal vowels and today marks long ones, ė is a long closed e, ū a long u, and č š ž are the sounds ch, sh and zh, spelled with the caron borrowed from Czech in the late 19th century in place of Polish-style cz and sz. Q, W and X appear only in foreign names. The Lithuanian keyboard layout puts ą č ę ė į š ų ū on the number row and ž next to it; on a phone, hold the plain letter and pick the accented one; in HTML they are ą č ę ė į š ų ū ž. Quotations open low and close high: „Labas!“ For the whole alphabet, see the Lithuanian letters collection; the neighbours have their own pages for Latvia, Poland, Belarus and Estonia.