Moldova Emoji

The Moldova flag emoji 🇲🇩 shows three vertical stripes, blue, yellow and red, with the national coat of arms in the middle of the yellow one. The tricolour was adopted in 1990, as Moldova moved toward the independence it declared on 27 August 1991. Without the coat of arms it would be almost the same as the flag of Romania 🇷🇴, which is why people search for the "moldovan flag without eagle": that plain blue, yellow and red flag is Romania's, and the shared colours reflect the shared history and language of the two countries. Andorra 🇦🇩 also puts a coat of arms on a blue, yellow and red tricolour, so look at the emblem when the flags are small.

Like every country flag, 🇲🇩 is not one character but two regional indicator letters, 🇲 + 🇩 for the country code MD. Phones and Macs draw the pair as a flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters MD instead; other platforms may display the flag. To show the colours without the flag, people write hearts 💙💛❤️ or squares 🟦🟨🟥 side by side.

The coat of arms is the answer to "what is the bird on the Moldovan flag": an eagle 🦅 holding an Orthodox cross in its beak, an olive branch in one talon and a sceptre in the other. On its breast is a red and blue shield with the head of an aurochs 🐂, the wild ox that was the emblem of the medieval Principality of Moldavia, with a star ⭐ between its horns, a rose 🌹 on one side and a crescent 🌙 on the other. ☦️ stands for the Orthodox Church, the faith of most Moldovans. Moldova is landlocked between Romania 🇷🇴 and Ukraine 🇺🇦, and 🇪🇺 belongs on the page too: Moldova became a candidate for European Union membership in 2022. The 2024 census counted about 2.4 million usual residents in the surveyed territory, excluding Transnistria and Bender.

Moldovan symbols and their meaning: mărțișor, wine and the stork

On 1 March Moldovans give each other a mărțișor: a small token on a twisted cord of red and white thread 🧶🧵, pinned to a coat or tied on the wrist and worn through March for health and good luck, then hung on a blossoming tree 🌸. The red and white ❤️🤍 are read as spring and winter, or as life and purity. There is no mărțișor emoji, so ❤️🤍🧶 is how people write it, often with Mărțișor fericit! The custom was inscribed by UNESCO in 2017, shared with Romania, Bulgaria and North Macedonia, and Chișinău holds a Mărțișor music festival every spring.

Wine 🍇🍷 is Moldova's best-known symbol. Its vineyards cover the hills from the north to the south, and under them run the world's most famous wine cellars: Mileștii Mici, with about 200 km of limestone galleries, holds the Guinness record for the largest wine collection, and Cricova near Chișinău is an underground town of tunnels with street names. National Wine Day (Ziua Națională a Vinului) fills the centre of Chișinău on the first weekend of October with tastings, music and dancing 🥂. Moldovan brandy is called divin 🥃.

The white stork on the logo of Moldovan wine comes from a legend about Stephen the Great (Ștefan cel Mare), the 15th-century prince of Moldavia: when his soldiers were besieged in a fortress and close to starving, storks flew over the walls and dropped bunches of grapes to them. There is no stork emoji, so 🐦🍇 is the nearest way to write it, and 🐦 also stands for the storks and swallows that come back at the time of the mărțișor.

Moldova emoji for food and drink

Mămăligă 🌽, a firm cornmeal porridge, is the centre of the Moldovan table, served with brânză 🧀 (salty sheep's cheese), smântână 🥛 (sour cream), fried eggs or stew, and with mujdei 🧄, a sharp garlic sauce. Plăcinte 🥧 are the everyday pies, thin dough folded around brânză, potato, cabbage or pumpkin; colțunași 🥟 are dumplings filled with cheese or cherries; zeamă 🍲 is a sour chicken soup with handmade noodles, the cure for every cold and every wedding morning. Sarmale are rice and meat rolled in cabbage or vine leaves 🥬, and stuffed peppers 🫑 come to the table all summer.

Guests are welcomed with bread and salt 🍞🧂: a round braided colac carried on an embroidered towel. Moldova's black soil and orchards make it a land of apples 🍎, cherries 🍒, peaches 🍑, watermelons 🍉 and honey 🍯, with sunflower 🌻 and wheat 🌾 fields stretching to the horizon in summer. The toast with a glass of wine is Noroc! (luck).

Moldovan holidays and the emoji people send

Moldova keeps two Christmases 🎄: 25 December and 7 January are both public holidays, so families can follow either church calendar. Groups of young men go from house to house singing colinde 🔔, a custom UNESCO lists together with Romania; on New Year's Eve children recite Plugușorul with bells and whip cracks, and the Capra 🐐, a dancer in a goat mask covered with ribbons, leaps through the village. On 1 January children wish health with a decorated sorcova.

Easter is the biggest religious feast, with red-painted eggs 🥚 and the greeting Hristos a înviat! About a week later comes Paștele Blajinilor, Memorial Easter, when families visit the graves of their relatives with candles 🕯️, coloured eggs and food to share. Independence Day on 27 August brings concerts and fireworks 🎆 🇲🇩, and Limba noastră (Our Language Day) on 31 August marks the 1989 law that returned the language to the Latin alphabet.

Moldova emoji for crafts, music, places and sports

The embroidered ia 👚🪡, the white blouse with a band of stitching on the shoulder, and the woven wall carpets of Moldovan village houses are both on UNESCO's list, shared with Romania. At weddings the whole party joins the hora 💃🕺, a big round dance, to the fiddle 🎻, the accordion 🪗, the drum 🥁 and the nai 🪈, the pan flute of the lăutari (folk musicians).

Moldovan pop has a cult following abroad. O-Zone's Dragostea din tei (2003) became the internet's "Numa Numa" song 🎤🎶; at Eurovision, Zdob și Zdub's drumming grandmother of 2005 and SunStroke Project's "Epic Sax Guy" 🎷 of 2010 are still memes, and SunStroke Project came third in 2017 with Hey Mamma.

For places, ⛪ stands for the monasteries such as Căpriana and the cave church of Orheiul Vechi 🏞️🪨, cut into a limestone cliff above a loop of the Răut river, and 🏰 for the round fortress of Soroca on the Dniester. 🌳 is the Codri, the forested hills of central Moldova, and 🏘️🐑 the villages with painted gates and wells. In sport, ⚽ recalls the night in 2021 when Sheriff Tiraspol beat Real Madrid 2–1 at the Bernabéu, and 🤼 is trânta, traditional Moldovan belt wrestling.

Romanian letters copy and paste: Ă Â Î Ș Ț and the leu

The official language of Moldova is Romanian; a 2023 law replaced the name "Moldovan language" with "Romanian" in all legislation, and the CLDR estimate counts about 2.3 million Romanian speakers in the country. Romanian adds five letters to A–Z: Ă ă (a short, central vowel, as in mămăligă), Â â and Î î (the same deep sound, written î at the start and end of a word and â inside it: încântat), Ș ș (sh) and Ț ț (ts). See the Romanian collection for every letter and how to type them.

Use Ș ș Ț ț with the comma below (U+0218–U+021B). The look-alikes with a cedilla, Ş ş Ţ ţ, come from older Windows and Unicode encodings, and plenty of Moldovan websites and signs still have them; they are a different character and can break search and spelling. On Windows, add the Romanian (Standard) keyboard; on a phone, long-press s, t, a or i. In HTML write ș for ș and ț for ț. Romanian quotes open low and close high: „așa”, with « » for a quote inside a quote.

In the breakaway region of Transnistria the same language, there called Moldovan, is still written in Cyrillic, with one letter of its own, Ӂ ӂ (zhe with breve) for the sound of j in "jam". Russian is widely used across the country, and Ukrainian (about 500,000 speakers) and Bulgarian (about 340,000) are the largest minority languages by the CLDR estimates; the Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Russian collections have their alphabets, and Gagauzia in the south has its own Turkic language. The currency is the Moldovan leu (plural lei, code MDL, 100 bani), which uses L as a Romanian-localized symbol: prices are written 100 lei, 100 L or MDL 100, and 🪙 is as close as emoji get. Leu means lion, like the Bulgarian lev.