Montenegro Emoji & Symbols

🇲🇪 the flag of Montenegro is a red field with a gold border and, in the middle, the gold coat of arms: a crowned double-headed eagle holding a sceptre and an orb, with a lion walking across the shield on its breast. Its colours work as hearts, ❤️💛, and the arms as 🦅🦁👑. Parliament adopted this flag in July 2004, together with the anthem Oj, svijetla majska zoro (Oh, bright dawn of May), two years before independence.

The flag emoji is not one stored picture. It is two regional indicator letters, 🇲 and 🇪, the country code ME, which phones and Macs draw as the red and gold flag. Windows has no country flag pictures in its emoji font, so on a Windows PC it shows as the letters ME; the person reading it on a phone still sees the flag. On Discord you can type :flag_me:; on Slack, :flag-me:. The same two letters are the country's internet domain, .me, which is sold worldwide for personal websites.

People also look for a Serbia and Montenegro flag emoji. From 2003 to 2006 the two countries formed the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, with a blue, white and red tricolour and the code CS. That code was withdrawn in September 2006, after Montenegro's May 2006 independence vote, and there has never been an emoji for it; people write 🇷🇸🇲🇪 instead. Neighbours have their own collections: Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Albania.

Montenegro emoji meanings: 🖤⛰️ 🦅 🏰 🐈

🖤⛰️ is the country's name in two emoji. Crna Gora, and Montenegro, its Venetian form, both mean Black Mountain, after the dark forested slopes of Mount Lovćen above the old royal capital Cetinje. In Cyrillic it is Црна Гора, and the eagle 🦅 has been the emblem of its rulers since the Crnojević dynasty of the 15th century; at weddings and celebrations men dance the oro, a circle dance in which the dancers in the middle stretch their arms out like eagles.

🏰 is Kotor, the walled town at the inner end of the Bay of Kotor, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1979. Its walls climb the cliff behind the town to the fortress of St John, well over a thousand steps up. 🐈 belongs to Kotor too: the old town is famous for its cats, which sleep on the marble paving and the church steps, and the town even has a cat museum. 🎭 fits the Kotor carnival, and ⛴️ the little car ferry that crosses the bay's narrow strait at Kamenari.

Further round the bay, Perast faces two islets, and on one of them stands the church of Our Lady of the Rocks ⛪. The islet was built by hand: by legend, after sailors found an icon of the Virgin on a rock there, seafarers dropped stones and sank old ships around it. Every year on 22 July, in the fašinada, the men of Perast still row out in a line of boats tied together and throw stones into the sea around it. Down the coast, 🏝️ is Sveti Stefan, a fortified fishing village on an islet joined to the shore by a causeway, now a luxury hotel; 🌊🏖️☀️ are the beaches of Budva and the long sandy beach at Ulcinj; and ⛵🛥️ the yachts of Tivat.

Mountains, Tara Canyon and Lake Skadar

Most of Montenegro is mountains, 🏔️🌲. Durmitor National Park 🏞️, on the UNESCO list since 1980, holds glacial lakes and the canyon of the Tara, often called the deepest canyon in Europe at about 1,300 metres. Rafting down it 🚣 is the summer trip, and the white concrete arches of the Đurđevića Tara Bridge 🌉 carry the road high over the river, with a zip line strung beside it. In winter Žabljak and Kolašin are where Montenegro skis ⛷️🎿.

Up on the high pastures shepherds still spend the summer in katuni, clusters of wooden huts 🛖 with their flocks 🐑, and walkers 🥾 cross them on the way to the peaks of Durmitor and Prokletije. Brown bears 🐻 and wolves 🐺 live in the forests, Biogradska Gora among them, one of the last primeval forests in Europe, and dolphins 🐬 are sometimes seen in the Bay of Kotor.

Lake Skadar, shared with Albania, is the largest lake in the Balkans, known for its water lilies, its carp 🐟 and its rare Dalmatian pelicans. On the coast near Bar grows an olive tree 🫒 said to be more than 2,000 years old, the Stara maslina. 🚂 is the Belgrade–Bar railway, opened in 1976, which crosses the Mala Rijeka viaduct about 200 metres above the river; when it opened it was the highest railway viaduct in the world.

Montenegrin food emoji: pršut, kačamak and Vranac

🥓🧀 is the classic plate of Njeguši, the village on the old road up from Kotor to Cetinje: njeguški pršut, ham dried in the mountain wind and smoked, cut paper-thin, with njeguški sir, the local cheese. There is no ham-on-the-bone emoji, so the bacon one stands in for it. In the mountains people eat kačamak 🌽, a thick porridge of cornmeal and potato served with cheese and kajmak, lamb or veal slow-baked under a sač, an iron lid covered in embers 🍖, pita 🥧, and priganice, small fried dough balls eaten with honey 🍯.

On the coast it is fish 🐟, crni rižot, black risotto coloured with squid ink 🦑, and mussels and oysters 🦪 farmed in the Bay of Kotor. To drink: 🍷🍇 for Vranac, the dark red grape Montenegro is known for, and Krstač, its own white; 🥃 for loza, grape rakija, offered to every guest; 🍺 for Nikšićko, the beer brewed in Nikšić; and ☕ for the coffee that goes with every conversation.

Holidays, faith and sports emoji for Montenegro

🇲🇪🎆 is for 21 May, Independence Day, the anniversary of the 2006 referendum in which Montenegrins voted to leave the union with Serbia, and for 13 July, Statehood Day, which recalls the recognition of Montenegro's independence at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and the uprising of 13 July 1941. Most Montenegrins are Orthodox Christians ☦️, with Muslim ☪️🕌 and Catholic ✝️ communities, the Catholics mainly around the Bay of Kotor. ⛪🕯️ fits Ostrog, the monastery set into a sheer cliff face where pilgrims of every faith come to light candles at the relics of St Basil of Ostrog. On Orthodox Christmas Eve, 6 January, families burn the badnjak, an oak branch 🪵🔥, and greet each other the next day with "Hristos se rodi"; 🥚 is for Easter eggs and 🌙 for Bajram.

🤽 water polo is the sport Montenegro wins at: the national team became European champions in 2008, the country's first big title after independence. 🤾 the women's handball team took silver at the London 2012 Olympics, Montenegro's first Olympic medal, and became European champions the same year. 🏀 Budućnost Podgorica is the big basketball club, and Nikola Vučević became an NBA All-Star. ⚽ rounds it off.

🎻 stands for the gusle, a bowed instrument, usually with a single string, to which singers perform long epic poems. 📜 is The Mountain Wreath by Petar II Petrović-Njegoš, the prince-bishop and poet buried in a mausoleum on the top of Lovćen, and 📖 the Oktoih of 1494, printed at the Crnojević printing house, one of the earliest books printed in Cyrillic. 🏛️ is Cetinje, the old royal capital, still full of the old embassies of the powers that recognised Montenegro in 1878; it became a kingdom in 1910.

Montenegrin alphabet: Ś, Ź and how to type č ć đ š ž

Montenegrin, the official language since the 2007 constitution, is written in both Latin and Cyrillic. Its Latin alphabet has 32 letters, with Č č, Ć ć, Đ đ, Š š, Ž ž, the digraphs Dž, Lj and Nj, and two letters added in 2009: Ś ś and Ź ź. They write the soft sounds of Montenegrin speech, as in śekira (axe, Serbian sjekira), śutra (tomorrow) and iźesti (to eat up). In Cyrillic the same sounds are С́ с́ and З́ з́, an ordinary С or З followed by the combining acute ́, since Unicode has no single character for them. Many writers keep to sj and zj, and the familiar Montenegrin đe (where) is spelled with Đ.

Ś and Ź are the same Unicode characters as the Polish letters; on the Polish (Programmers) keyboard on Windows, AltGr+S and AltGr+X type lowercase ś and ź, with Shift for capitals. On a phone, long-press s or z; long-press c, d or z for č ć đ ž. The Serbian (Latin) or Croatian keyboard on Windows and the Croatian one on a Mac have Š Đ right of P, Č Ć right of L and Ž next to Ć. In HTML they are Ś ś Ź ź, Č Ć Đ Š Ž. Quotation marks open low and close high: „Crna Gora“.

Montenegro has no currency of its own: it pays in euros € 💶, written 10 € or 10 EUR. It took the Deutsche Mark in 1999 and moved with it to the euro in 2002, without being a member of the EU or the eurozone, so it mints no euro coins of its own. In Ulcinj and Tuzi, where many Albanians live, signs are also in Albanian, with Ç ç and Ë ë; see the Albanian collection for the rest.