Romania Emoji

The Romania flag emoji 🇷🇴 shows three vertical stripes, blue, yellow and red. The tricolour was introduced in 1834 and gained revolutionary meaning in 1848; in December 1989 revolutionaries cut the communist emblem out of the middle of their flags and marched under the tricolour with a hole in it. Romania celebrates the flag on 26 June, and its National Day on 1 December, the day in 1918 when the assembly at Alba Iulia voted for the union of Transylvania with Romania.

The flag people most often confuse with 🇷🇴 is Chad 🇹🇩: the same three colours in the same order, with only a slightly darker blue. Chad questioned the likeness in 2004, and Romania said it would keep its tricolour. Moldova 🇲🇩 and Andorra 🇦🇩 also fly blue, yellow and red, but with a coat of arms in the middle, so a Romanian-looking flag with a crest is one of those two. Like every country flag, 🇷🇴 is two regional indicator letters, 🇷 + 🇴 for the country code RO; phones and Macs draw the pair as a flag, Windows shows the letters RO, and the recipient may see a flag, the letters RO or a missing-flag glyph depending on their platform. Without the flag, people write the colours as 💙💛❤️ or 🟦🟨🟥.

The coat of arms is a golden eagle 🦅 with an Orthodox cross in its beak, a sword 🗡️ in one talon and a mace in the other, and since 2016 a crown 👑 on its head. On its breast, a shield joins the emblems of the historic regions: the eagle between the sun ☀️ and the moon 🌙 for Wallachia, the aurochs head 🐂 with a star ⭐ between a rose 🌹 and a crescent for Moldavia, a lion 🦁 on a bridge for Oltenia and Banat, a black eagle above seven red towers for Transylvania, Maramureș and Crișana, and two dolphins 🐬 for Dobruja on the Black Sea. ☦️ stands for the Romanian Orthodox Church, the faith of most Romanians. Romania joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union 🇪🇺 in 2007, and became a full member of the Schengen area in 2025. The CLDR estimate puts the population at about 18 million.

Romanian symbols and their meanings: mărțișor, ia and the hora

On 1 March Romanians give a mărțișor: a small charm, often a snowdrop, a four-leaf clover 🍀, a chimney sweep or a horseshoe, hung on a twisted red-and-white cord 🧶🧵. It is worn on the coat or the wrist for health and luck through the first days of spring, then tied to a blossoming tree 🌸. The red and white ❤️🤍 are read as spring and winter, or life and purity, and there is no mărțișor emoji, so ❤️🤍🧶 is how people write it. UNESCO inscribed the custom in 2017, shared with Bulgaria, Moldova and North Macedonia. Just before it, on 24 February, comes Dragobete 💕, the Romanian day of love, and a week after it, on 8 March, flowers 💐 for Women's Day.

The ia 👚 is the white peasant blouse with embroidery 🪡 on the shoulder, the altiță; it is on UNESCO's list (2022, with Moldova), it has its own day on 24 June, and it is the source of most "Romanian symbols of protection" people look up: the stitched motifs of each region, such as suns and geometric signs, were believed to guard the wearer. At weddings everyone joins the hora 💃🕺, a big round dance, and the Hora Unirii (the Union Hora) is danced in town squares on both union days, 24 January (the union of Wallachia and Moldavia in 1859) and 1 December. The Călușari, men who dance with sticks and bells at Pentecost, the doina, a free, mournful song, and the lăutari with the fiddle 🎻, the accordion 🪗 and the nai 🪈 (the pan flute that Gheorghe Zamfir made famous) are all part of the same heritage.

In folklore, strigoi are the restless dead, and on the night before St Andrew's Day (30 November, the feast of Romania's patron saint) people rub garlic 🧄 on windows and doors to keep them away. That is the soil Bram Stoker drew on: his 1897 novel Dracula 🧛🦇 took its Count's name from Vlad III Dracula, a 15th-century prince of Wallachia known in Romania as Vlad Țepeș. Stoker never went to Romania, and in Romania Vlad is remembered as a ruler known for harsh justice rather than as a vampire, but Bran Castle 🏰 near Brașov is sold to visitors as Dracula's Castle and is one of the most visited places in the country.

Romania emoji for food and drink

Mămăligă 🌽, a firm cornmeal porridge, comes with brânză 🧀 (salty sheep's cheese) and smântână 🥛 (sour cream), and with sarmale 🥬, rolls of minced meat and rice in pickled cabbage leaves, the dish of every Christmas, Easter and wedding. Ciorbă 🍲 is the family of sour soups, from vegetable to tripe (ciorbă de burtă). Mici, little skinless grilled rolls of minced meat, are eaten with mustard and a beer 🍺 at every barbecue and above all on 1 May; there is no mici emoji, and 🌭 is the one people use.

For something sweet there are papanași 🍩, cheese doughnuts with sour cream and jam, and cozonac 🍞, a swirled sweet bread baked for Christmas and Easter; on the street, covrigi 🥨 are the pretzel-like rings sold warm from tiny bakeries. Every autumn, kitchens fill with jars 🫙 of zacuscă, a spread of roasted eggplant 🍆 and peppers 🫑, and salată de vinete is the eggplant salad on bread. Guests are welcomed with bread and salt 🍞🧂, sunflower seeds 🌻 are the snack of every park bench, and on Ignat, 20 December, village families slaughter the pig 🐖 for the Christmas table.

To drink: țuică, plum brandy, and the stronger pălincă of Transylvania 🥃, and wine 🍇🍷 from Dealu Mare, Cotnari and Murfatlar, often from native grapes such as Fetească neagră. The toast is Noroc! (luck) or Sănătate! (health) 🥂.

Romanian holidays and the emoji people send

Christmas 🎄 on 25 December starts with colinde 🔔: groups go from house to house singing carols, a custom UNESCO lists together with Moldova. Between Christmas and New Year the Capra 🐐, a dancer in a goat mask hung with ribbons, leaps through the villages, and in Moldavia whole troupes dress in real bearskins for the bear dance. Children wait for Moș Crăciun 🎅 and on 1 January wish La mulți ani! with a decorated sorcova. 1 December and New Year's Eve both end in fireworks 🎆.

Easter, the Orthodox one, is the biggest religious feast. At midnight people bring candles 🕯️ to the church, light them from the priest's flame at Hristos a înviat! (Christ is risen) and carry them home lit; on Sunday they knock red eggs 🥚 together, answering Adevărat a înviat! On Sânziene, 24 June, girls wear crowns of yellow bedstraw flowers 🌼, the night of the fairies of midsummer.

Romania emoji for places, wildlife and sports

Transylvania is a land of castles 🏰: Bran, the Gothic Corvin Castle at Hunedoara, the royal Peleș in Sinaia, and the medieval citadel of Sighișoara, where Vlad III is said to have been born. ⛪ stands for the painted monasteries of Bukovina, covered inside and out with frescoes (Voroneț gave its name to a blue), and for the tall wooden churches of Maramureș; 🪦 for the Merry Cemetery of Săpânța, whose blue wooden crosses carry painted, joking verses about the dead. In Bucharest, 🏛️ is the Romanian Athenaeum, home of the George Enescu Festival, and the Palace of the Parliament, one of the largest buildings in the world.

The Carpathians 🏔️🌲 curve through the middle of the country, and the Transfăgărășan road 🛣️🚗, which Top Gear called the best road in the world, climbs across the Făgăraș mountains; the car is likely a Dacia, Romania's own brand. Underground, the Salina Turda salt mine has a Ferris wheel 🎡 in a cavern. The Carpathian forests hold the largest population of brown bears 🐻 in Europe outside Russia, with wolves 🐺, deer 🦌, boar 🐗 and reintroduced European bison 🦬. In the east, the Black Sea 🏖️🌊 has the resorts around Constanța and Mamaia, and the Danube Delta 🛶🦢🐟, a UNESCO reserve of reeds and channels, is home to Europe's biggest pelican colonies.

In sport, 🤸🔟 is Nadia Comăneci, who at 14 scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics at Montreal in 1976. 🎾 is Simona Halep, world No. 1 and winner of Roland Garros (2018) and Wimbledon (2019), and before her Ilie Năstase; ⚽ is Gheorghe Hagi, "the Maradona of the Carpathians", whose team reached the World Cup quarter-finals in 1994. Romania's men won the handball 🤾 world title four times, and its women's eight 🚣 won three Olympic rowing golds in a row (1996, 2000, 2004). In winter, ⛷️ means Poiana Brașov or Sinaia.

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

Romanian, a Romance language that grew from the Latin spoken in Roman Dacia, is the official language, with about 16 million speakers in Romania by the CLDR estimate. It adds five letters to A–Z: Ă ă (a short, central vowel, as in mămăligă), Â â and Î î (the same sound, written î at a word's beginning or end and â inside ordinary words; î also appears medially in compounds such as neînțeles, as in România and încântat), Ș ș (sh) and Ț ț (ts). The Romanian collection has the whole alphabet and every way to type it.

Use Ș ș Ț ț with the comma below (U+0218–U+021B). They only reached Unicode in 1999, so older encodings and keyboards made do with the cedilla look-alikes Ş ş Ţ ţ, which still turn up on websites and signs; they are different characters and can break search and spelling. On Windows add the Romanian (Standard) keyboard; on a phone, long-press a, i, s or t. 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.

Hungarian is spoken by about 1.2 million people in Romania by the CLDR estimate, mostly in Transylvania (see the Hungarian collection for its letters), and the Transylvanian Saxons brought German to towns like Sibiu and Brașov, whose fortified churches are on UNESCO's list. Romanian is also the official language of neighbouring Moldova 🇲🇩. The currency is the Romanian leu (plural lei, code RON, 100 bani), which has no sign of its own: prices are written 100 lei or 100 RON, and 🪙 is as close as emoji get. Leu means lion; in 2005 the leu was redenominated, 10,000 old lei becoming 1 new leu, and every banknote is now printed on polymer. Romania is in the EU but still uses the leu, not the euro.