NextSpring

Seven Years, Three If You Hold a Union Passport, and a Written Examination You Pay for Twice

Greek naturalisation is governed by the Code of Greek Nationality, Law 3284/2004, which has been rewritten in pieces rather than reissued. The residence condition is in article 5 as replaced by article 2 of Law 3838/2010: seven continuous years of lawful residence in Greece before the application, cut to three for nationals of a Union member state, for the spouse of a Greek with a child, for a person with parental responsibility for a Greek child, and for recognised political refugees and stateless persons, and dispensed with entirely for ethnic Greeks and for anyone born in Greece who has lived there ever since. The applicant must be an adult, free of the catalogue of convictions the same article lists, and hold one of the residence titles it enumerates. The substantive conditions are in article 5A as replaced by article 3 of Law 4735/2020: adequate Greek, knowledge of Greek history and geography, culture and institutions, the capacity to take part in political life, and smooth integration into economic and social life, with stable work, tax and insurance compliance and family and community ties named as the evidence. Since 2020 those first two are proved by examination. Article 7 has the applicant sit a written test drawn at random from a published bank of at least a hundred texts and three hundred questions, with the language paper at level B1. The examination costs 150 euro and the application 550 - or 100 for ethnic Greeks, Union nationals, recognised refugees and stateless persons.

Verified with official sourceMonitor - can change2026-10-10

At a glance

Residence required
Seven continuous years before the application

Article 5(1)(d) of the Code of Greek Nationality as replaced by article 2 of Law 3838/2010.

Reduced residence
Three continuous years

Article 5(1)(d), for nationals of a Union member state, spouses of a Greek with a child, persons with parental responsibility for a Greek child, recognised political refugees and stateless persons.

No residence requirement at all
Ethnic Greeks, and people born in Greece who have lived there continuously

Article 5(1)(d), final paragraph, which disapplies the seven-year condition for both groups.

Language level
Greek at a level corresponding to B1

Article 7(1) of the Code of Greek Nationality as replaced by article 6 of Law 4735/2020, tested in understanding and producing both spoken and written language.

What else is examined
Greek history and geography, Greek culture, and the institutions of the political system

Article 7(1) of the Code of Greek Nationality as replaced by article 6 of Law 4735/2020.

Where the questions come from
A published bank of at least 100 texts and 300 questions, drawn at random

Article 7(1), which requires the bank to be kept by the General Secretariat for Citizenship and to be open to anyone through the Ministry of the Interior's website.

Examination fee
150 euro

Article 7(1) of the Code of Greek Nationality as replaced by article 6 of Law 4735/2020; paying it is a condition of sitting.

Application fee
550 euro, or 200 euro to reapply

Article 6(1)(z) of the Code of Greek Nationality as replaced by article 5 of Law 4735/2020.

Reduced application fee
100 euro

Article 6(1)(z), for ethnic Greeks, holders of the nationality of a Union member state, recognised political refugees and stateless persons.

Dual nationality
Not addressed in the provisions read here

Articles 5, 5A, 6 and 7 of the Code of Greek Nationality, as replaced in 2010 and 2020, impose no renunciation of an existing nationality. Article 8 of the Code, which was not read, governs loss of Greek nationality.

Requirements

  • Seven continuous years of lawful residence, or three in the privileged cases
  • Adulthood at the date of the declaration of naturalisation
  • One of the residence titles article 5(1)(e) of the Nationality Code lists
  • No conviction of the kinds that article 5(1)(b) sets out
  • A Certificate of Adequacy of Knowledge for Naturalisation, obtained by written examination
  • A tax assessment for each year of the required residence, and a social security number
  • An electronic fee of 550 euro, or 100 euro in the reduced cases, plus 150 euro to sit the examination

Country-level policy

Greece Publishes Its Laws and Never Republishes Them, So the Current Text of Any Article Lives in Whatever Act Last Rewrote It

The National Printing House issues the Government Gazette and nothing else. There is no official consolidated edition of any Greek statute, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code or the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as it now stands. What there is instead is a drafting convention that does half the job. When a Greek Act amends an article, it usually says which words are replaced and then reprints the whole amended article under the formula "and article N is formed as follows" - so the amending Act carries the current text, and a reader who finds the right amending Act gets a reliable reading of the provision. The cost is that the reader has to know which Act that is. Every record for Greece in this corpus is quoted from the gazette issue that last moved the provision, which is why the Immigration Code is quoted here from four different issues: the 2023 Act for the articles nothing has touched, the 2023 Act that postponed its own commencement, the 2024 Act that replaced the investor article, and the two 2026 Acts that rewrote the work, student, family and long-term residence articles. The ministry's own copy is no help: the PDF of the Code on migration.gov.gr is byte for byte the gazette file.

Exceptions by origin

No exceptions recorded

Nothing we have read treats any nationality differently for this topic. The rule above applies to everyone.

What the law says

Text layer - verbatim verifiedΚώδικας Ελληνικής Ιθαγένειας (ν. 3284/2004), άρθρο 5 όπως αντικαταστάθηκε με το άρθρο 2 του ν. 3838/2010 · Άρθρο 5, παρ. 1, περ. δ
«Να διαμένει στην Ελλάδα νόμιμα για επτά συνεχή»

The seven-year condition. The word that completes it on the next line of the same column is "έτη", followed by "πριν από την υποβολή της αίτησης πολιτογράφησης". Time spent in Greece as a diplomatic or administrative official of a foreign state does not count.

Read it at the source
About this source

Greece's official publisher, a public service under the Presidency of the Government. It prints and circulates the Government Gazette, the Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως, in numbered series - Α' for laws, presidential decrees and acts of the Cabinet, Β' for ministerial decisions - and that is the whole of what it publishes. The address that matters is not et.gr. Its search application at search.et.gr builds every PDF link against an Azure storage account, and the live form is https://ia37rg02wpsa01.blob.core.windows.net/fek/<SS>/<YYYY>/<YYYY><SS><NNNNN>.pdf, where SS is the series number zero-padded to two digits, YYYY the year and NNNNN the issue number zero-padded to five: ΦΕΚ Α' 81 of 2023 is /fek/01/2023/20230100081.pdf, and ΦΕΚ Β' 3056 of 2013 is /fek/02/2013/20130203056.pdf. Every issue is a digitally signed PDF naming ΕΘΝΙΚΟ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ as its author, so what is served is the publisher's own artefact and not a mirror.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: It consolidates nothing. There is no official edition of any Greek statute as it now stands, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code, the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as currently in force. The practical substitute is a drafting convention rather than a service: an amending Act usually reprints the whole amended article under the formula 'και το άρθρο N διαμορφώνεται ως εξής', so the current text of a provision lives in whichever issue last changed it, and the reader has to know which that is. It cannot be cited for the text of any article without first establishing that nothing has amended it. Two mechanical limits matter as well. The gazette has been set in two columns for most of its history, and the project's PDF extraction preserves the physical layout, so in a stored reading a line of the left column is followed immediately by a line of the right one - a quotation taken from an issue of 2024 or earlier has to fit inside a single line of a single column, around fifty characters. The layout changed to a single full-width column during 2025: the 2026 issues read as continuous prose and can be quoted at length. And issues from before roughly 2007 are set in fonts with a non-Unicode encoding: ΦΕΚ Α' 217 of 2004, which carries the Code of Greek Nationality, extracts entirely as Latin-1 mojibake and cannot be quoted at all. Gazette issues also carry one or two physically blank pages before the colophon, which a page-coverage check reports as empty. The host et.gr itself cannot be used: a request for the old /api/DownloadFeksApi/ endpoint is redirected to a bare IP address whose certificate no client can verify.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedΚώδικας Ελληνικής Ιθαγένειας (ν. 3284/2004), άρθρο 5 όπως αντικαταστάθηκε με το άρθρο 2 του ν. 3838/2010 · Άρθρο 5, παρ. 1, περ. δ
«διαμονή αυτών στην Ελλάδα επί μια τουλάχιστον»

The three-year rule, which the same sentence opens by naming its beneficiaries: holders of the nationality of a member state of the European Union, spouses of a Greek with a child, holders of parental responsibility for a child of Greek nationality, recognised political refugees and stateless persons. The word completing the clause on the next line is "τριετία".

Read it at the source
About this source

Greece's official publisher, a public service under the Presidency of the Government. It prints and circulates the Government Gazette, the Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως, in numbered series - Α' for laws, presidential decrees and acts of the Cabinet, Β' for ministerial decisions - and that is the whole of what it publishes. The address that matters is not et.gr. Its search application at search.et.gr builds every PDF link against an Azure storage account, and the live form is https://ia37rg02wpsa01.blob.core.windows.net/fek/<SS>/<YYYY>/<YYYY><SS><NNNNN>.pdf, where SS is the series number zero-padded to two digits, YYYY the year and NNNNN the issue number zero-padded to five: ΦΕΚ Α' 81 of 2023 is /fek/01/2023/20230100081.pdf, and ΦΕΚ Β' 3056 of 2013 is /fek/02/2013/20130203056.pdf. Every issue is a digitally signed PDF naming ΕΘΝΙΚΟ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ as its author, so what is served is the publisher's own artefact and not a mirror.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: It consolidates nothing. There is no official edition of any Greek statute as it now stands, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code, the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as currently in force. The practical substitute is a drafting convention rather than a service: an amending Act usually reprints the whole amended article under the formula 'και το άρθρο N διαμορφώνεται ως εξής', so the current text of a provision lives in whichever issue last changed it, and the reader has to know which that is. It cannot be cited for the text of any article without first establishing that nothing has amended it. Two mechanical limits matter as well. The gazette has been set in two columns for most of its history, and the project's PDF extraction preserves the physical layout, so in a stored reading a line of the left column is followed immediately by a line of the right one - a quotation taken from an issue of 2024 or earlier has to fit inside a single line of a single column, around fifty characters. The layout changed to a single full-width column during 2025: the 2026 issues read as continuous prose and can be quoted at length. And issues from before roughly 2007 are set in fonts with a non-Unicode encoding: ΦΕΚ Α' 217 of 2004, which carries the Code of Greek Nationality, extracts entirely as Latin-1 mojibake and cannot be quoted at all. Gazette issues also carry one or two physically blank pages before the colophon, which a page-coverage check reports as empty. The host et.gr itself cannot be used: a request for the old /api/DownloadFeksApi/ endpoint is redirected to a bare IP address whose certificate no client can verify.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedΚώδικας Ελληνικής Ιθαγένειας (ν. 3284/2004), άρθρο 5 όπως αντικαταστάθηκε με το άρθρο 2 του ν. 3838/2010 · Άρθρο 5, παρ. 1, περ. δ
«Για τους ομογενείς και για όσους έχουν γεννηθεί και»

The two groups for whom the residence condition does not apply at all. The sentence closes on the next line of the same column with "κατοικούν συνεχώς στην Ελλάδα δεν απαιτείται η χρονική προϋπόθεση της επταετούς διαμονής".

Read it at the source
About this source

Greece's official publisher, a public service under the Presidency of the Government. It prints and circulates the Government Gazette, the Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως, in numbered series - Α' for laws, presidential decrees and acts of the Cabinet, Β' for ministerial decisions - and that is the whole of what it publishes. The address that matters is not et.gr. Its search application at search.et.gr builds every PDF link against an Azure storage account, and the live form is https://ia37rg02wpsa01.blob.core.windows.net/fek/<SS>/<YYYY>/<YYYY><SS><NNNNN>.pdf, where SS is the series number zero-padded to two digits, YYYY the year and NNNNN the issue number zero-padded to five: ΦΕΚ Α' 81 of 2023 is /fek/01/2023/20230100081.pdf, and ΦΕΚ Β' 3056 of 2013 is /fek/02/2013/20130203056.pdf. Every issue is a digitally signed PDF naming ΕΘΝΙΚΟ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ as its author, so what is served is the publisher's own artefact and not a mirror.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: It consolidates nothing. There is no official edition of any Greek statute as it now stands, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code, the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as currently in force. The practical substitute is a drafting convention rather than a service: an amending Act usually reprints the whole amended article under the formula 'και το άρθρο N διαμορφώνεται ως εξής', so the current text of a provision lives in whichever issue last changed it, and the reader has to know which that is. It cannot be cited for the text of any article without first establishing that nothing has amended it. Two mechanical limits matter as well. The gazette has been set in two columns for most of its history, and the project's PDF extraction preserves the physical layout, so in a stored reading a line of the left column is followed immediately by a line of the right one - a quotation taken from an issue of 2024 or earlier has to fit inside a single line of a single column, around fifty characters. The layout changed to a single full-width column during 2025: the 2026 issues read as continuous prose and can be quoted at length. And issues from before roughly 2007 are set in fonts with a non-Unicode encoding: ΦΕΚ Α' 217 of 2004, which carries the Code of Greek Nationality, extracts entirely as Latin-1 mojibake and cannot be quoted at all. Gazette issues also carry one or two physically blank pages before the colophon, which a page-coverage check reports as empty. The host et.gr itself cannot be used: a request for the old /api/DownloadFeksApi/ endpoint is redirected to a bare IP address whose certificate no client can verify.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedΚώδικας Ελληνικής Ιθαγένειας (ν. 3284/2004), άρθρο 5 όπως αντικαταστάθηκε με το άρθρο 2 του ν. 3838/2010 · Άρθρο 5, παρ. 1, περ. α
«Να είναι ενήλικος κατά το χρόνο της υποβολής της»

The first formal condition. The provision goes on to the criminal-record bar in point (b), the absence of expulsion or unresolved residence proceedings in point (c), and the list of acceptable residence titles in point (e).

Read it at the source
About this source

Greece's official publisher, a public service under the Presidency of the Government. It prints and circulates the Government Gazette, the Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως, in numbered series - Α' for laws, presidential decrees and acts of the Cabinet, Β' for ministerial decisions - and that is the whole of what it publishes. The address that matters is not et.gr. Its search application at search.et.gr builds every PDF link against an Azure storage account, and the live form is https://ia37rg02wpsa01.blob.core.windows.net/fek/<SS>/<YYYY>/<YYYY><SS><NNNNN>.pdf, where SS is the series number zero-padded to two digits, YYYY the year and NNNNN the issue number zero-padded to five: ΦΕΚ Α' 81 of 2023 is /fek/01/2023/20230100081.pdf, and ΦΕΚ Β' 3056 of 2013 is /fek/02/2013/20130203056.pdf. Every issue is a digitally signed PDF naming ΕΘΝΙΚΟ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ as its author, so what is served is the publisher's own artefact and not a mirror.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: It consolidates nothing. There is no official edition of any Greek statute as it now stands, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code, the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as currently in force. The practical substitute is a drafting convention rather than a service: an amending Act usually reprints the whole amended article under the formula 'και το άρθρο N διαμορφώνεται ως εξής', so the current text of a provision lives in whichever issue last changed it, and the reader has to know which that is. It cannot be cited for the text of any article without first establishing that nothing has amended it. Two mechanical limits matter as well. The gazette has been set in two columns for most of its history, and the project's PDF extraction preserves the physical layout, so in a stored reading a line of the left column is followed immediately by a line of the right one - a quotation taken from an issue of 2024 or earlier has to fit inside a single line of a single column, around fifty characters. The layout changed to a single full-width column during 2025: the 2026 issues read as continuous prose and can be quoted at length. And issues from before roughly 2007 are set in fonts with a non-Unicode encoding: ΦΕΚ Α' 217 of 2004, which carries the Code of Greek Nationality, extracts entirely as Latin-1 mojibake and cannot be quoted at all. Gazette issues also carry one or two physically blank pages before the colophon, which a page-coverage check reports as empty. The host et.gr itself cannot be used: a request for the old /api/DownloadFeksApi/ endpoint is redirected to a bare IP address whose certificate no client can verify.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedΚώδικας Ελληνικής Ιθαγένειας (ν. 3284/2004), άρθρο 5Α όπως αντικαταστάθηκε με το άρθρο 3 του ν. 4735/2020 · Άρθρο 5Α, παρ. 1, περ. δ
«Να έχει ενταχθεί ομαλά στην οικονομική και»

The integration condition. The paragraph that follows names what is weighed: stable work and economic activity, continuous compliance with tax and insurance obligations, family ties to a Greek, familiarity with customs, voluntary work, sports clubs, municipal activity and civil society events.

Read it at the source
About this source

Greece's official publisher, a public service under the Presidency of the Government. It prints and circulates the Government Gazette, the Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως, in numbered series - Α' for laws, presidential decrees and acts of the Cabinet, Β' for ministerial decisions - and that is the whole of what it publishes. The address that matters is not et.gr. Its search application at search.et.gr builds every PDF link against an Azure storage account, and the live form is https://ia37rg02wpsa01.blob.core.windows.net/fek/<SS>/<YYYY>/<YYYY><SS><NNNNN>.pdf, where SS is the series number zero-padded to two digits, YYYY the year and NNNNN the issue number zero-padded to five: ΦΕΚ Α' 81 of 2023 is /fek/01/2023/20230100081.pdf, and ΦΕΚ Β' 3056 of 2013 is /fek/02/2013/20130203056.pdf. Every issue is a digitally signed PDF naming ΕΘΝΙΚΟ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ as its author, so what is served is the publisher's own artefact and not a mirror.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: It consolidates nothing. There is no official edition of any Greek statute as it now stands, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code, the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as currently in force. The practical substitute is a drafting convention rather than a service: an amending Act usually reprints the whole amended article under the formula 'και το άρθρο N διαμορφώνεται ως εξής', so the current text of a provision lives in whichever issue last changed it, and the reader has to know which that is. It cannot be cited for the text of any article without first establishing that nothing has amended it. Two mechanical limits matter as well. The gazette has been set in two columns for most of its history, and the project's PDF extraction preserves the physical layout, so in a stored reading a line of the left column is followed immediately by a line of the right one - a quotation taken from an issue of 2024 or earlier has to fit inside a single line of a single column, around fifty characters. The layout changed to a single full-width column during 2025: the 2026 issues read as continuous prose and can be quoted at length. And issues from before roughly 2007 are set in fonts with a non-Unicode encoding: ΦΕΚ Α' 217 of 2004, which carries the Code of Greek Nationality, extracts entirely as Latin-1 mojibake and cannot be quoted at all. Gazette issues also carry one or two physically blank pages before the colophon, which a page-coverage check reports as empty. The host et.gr itself cannot be used: a request for the old /api/DownloadFeksApi/ endpoint is redirected to a bare IP address whose certificate no client can verify.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedΚώδικας Ελληνικής Ιθαγένειας (ν. 3284/2004), άρθρο 7 όπως αντικαταστάθηκε με το άρθρο 6 του ν. 4735/2020 · Άρθρο 7, παρ. 1
«καλείται να συμμετάσχει σε γραπτή δοκιμασία»

The examination, introduced in 2020 to prove the conditions in points (a) and (b) of article 5A. Before it, those conditions were assessed in an interview.

Read it at the source
About this source

Greece's official publisher, a public service under the Presidency of the Government. It prints and circulates the Government Gazette, the Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως, in numbered series - Α' for laws, presidential decrees and acts of the Cabinet, Β' for ministerial decisions - and that is the whole of what it publishes. The address that matters is not et.gr. Its search application at search.et.gr builds every PDF link against an Azure storage account, and the live form is https://ia37rg02wpsa01.blob.core.windows.net/fek/<SS>/<YYYY>/<YYYY><SS><NNNNN>.pdf, where SS is the series number zero-padded to two digits, YYYY the year and NNNNN the issue number zero-padded to five: ΦΕΚ Α' 81 of 2023 is /fek/01/2023/20230100081.pdf, and ΦΕΚ Β' 3056 of 2013 is /fek/02/2013/20130203056.pdf. Every issue is a digitally signed PDF naming ΕΘΝΙΚΟ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ as its author, so what is served is the publisher's own artefact and not a mirror.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: It consolidates nothing. There is no official edition of any Greek statute as it now stands, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code, the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as currently in force. The practical substitute is a drafting convention rather than a service: an amending Act usually reprints the whole amended article under the formula 'και το άρθρο N διαμορφώνεται ως εξής', so the current text of a provision lives in whichever issue last changed it, and the reader has to know which that is. It cannot be cited for the text of any article without first establishing that nothing has amended it. Two mechanical limits matter as well. The gazette has been set in two columns for most of its history, and the project's PDF extraction preserves the physical layout, so in a stored reading a line of the left column is followed immediately by a line of the right one - a quotation taken from an issue of 2024 or earlier has to fit inside a single line of a single column, around fifty characters. The layout changed to a single full-width column during 2025: the 2026 issues read as continuous prose and can be quoted at length. And issues from before roughly 2007 are set in fonts with a non-Unicode encoding: ΦΕΚ Α' 217 of 2004, which carries the Code of Greek Nationality, extracts entirely as Latin-1 mojibake and cannot be quoted at all. Gazette issues also carry one or two physically blank pages before the colophon, which a page-coverage check reports as empty. The host et.gr itself cannot be used: a request for the old /api/DownloadFeksApi/ endpoint is redirected to a bare IP address whose certificate no client can verify.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedΚώδικας Ελληνικής Ιθαγένειας (ν. 3284/2004), άρθρο 7 όπως αντικαταστάθηκε με το άρθρο 6 του ν. 4735/2020 · Άρθρο 7, παρ. 1
«εξετάσεις ελληνικής γλώσσας επιπέδου»

The language standard. The words completing it on the next line of the same column are "ανάλογου του Β1 στην κατανόηση και παραγωγή του προφορικού και του γραπτού λόγου" - a level corresponding to B1, in understanding and producing both spoken and written Greek.

Read it at the source
About this source

Greece's official publisher, a public service under the Presidency of the Government. It prints and circulates the Government Gazette, the Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως, in numbered series - Α' for laws, presidential decrees and acts of the Cabinet, Β' for ministerial decisions - and that is the whole of what it publishes. The address that matters is not et.gr. Its search application at search.et.gr builds every PDF link against an Azure storage account, and the live form is https://ia37rg02wpsa01.blob.core.windows.net/fek/<SS>/<YYYY>/<YYYY><SS><NNNNN>.pdf, where SS is the series number zero-padded to two digits, YYYY the year and NNNNN the issue number zero-padded to five: ΦΕΚ Α' 81 of 2023 is /fek/01/2023/20230100081.pdf, and ΦΕΚ Β' 3056 of 2013 is /fek/02/2013/20130203056.pdf. Every issue is a digitally signed PDF naming ΕΘΝΙΚΟ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ as its author, so what is served is the publisher's own artefact and not a mirror.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: It consolidates nothing. There is no official edition of any Greek statute as it now stands, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code, the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as currently in force. The practical substitute is a drafting convention rather than a service: an amending Act usually reprints the whole amended article under the formula 'και το άρθρο N διαμορφώνεται ως εξής', so the current text of a provision lives in whichever issue last changed it, and the reader has to know which that is. It cannot be cited for the text of any article without first establishing that nothing has amended it. Two mechanical limits matter as well. The gazette has been set in two columns for most of its history, and the project's PDF extraction preserves the physical layout, so in a stored reading a line of the left column is followed immediately by a line of the right one - a quotation taken from an issue of 2024 or earlier has to fit inside a single line of a single column, around fifty characters. The layout changed to a single full-width column during 2025: the 2026 issues read as continuous prose and can be quoted at length. And issues from before roughly 2007 are set in fonts with a non-Unicode encoding: ΦΕΚ Α' 217 of 2004, which carries the Code of Greek Nationality, extracts entirely as Latin-1 mojibake and cannot be quoted at all. Gazette issues also carry one or two physically blank pages before the colophon, which a page-coverage check reports as empty. The host et.gr itself cannot be used: a request for the old /api/DownloadFeksApi/ endpoint is redirected to a bare IP address whose certificate no client can verify.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedΚώδικας Ελληνικής Ιθαγένειας (ν. 3284/2004), άρθρο 7 όπως αντικαταστάθηκε με το άρθρο 6 του ν. 4735/2020 · Άρθρο 7, παρ. 1
«εξέταστρου ύψους εκατόν πενήντα (150) ευρώ»

Paying this is a condition of sitting the examination, and it is separate from the fee for the application itself.

Read it at the source
About this source

Greece's official publisher, a public service under the Presidency of the Government. It prints and circulates the Government Gazette, the Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως, in numbered series - Α' for laws, presidential decrees and acts of the Cabinet, Β' for ministerial decisions - and that is the whole of what it publishes. The address that matters is not et.gr. Its search application at search.et.gr builds every PDF link against an Azure storage account, and the live form is https://ia37rg02wpsa01.blob.core.windows.net/fek/<SS>/<YYYY>/<YYYY><SS><NNNNN>.pdf, where SS is the series number zero-padded to two digits, YYYY the year and NNNNN the issue number zero-padded to five: ΦΕΚ Α' 81 of 2023 is /fek/01/2023/20230100081.pdf, and ΦΕΚ Β' 3056 of 2013 is /fek/02/2013/20130203056.pdf. Every issue is a digitally signed PDF naming ΕΘΝΙΚΟ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ as its author, so what is served is the publisher's own artefact and not a mirror.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: It consolidates nothing. There is no official edition of any Greek statute as it now stands, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code, the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as currently in force. The practical substitute is a drafting convention rather than a service: an amending Act usually reprints the whole amended article under the formula 'και το άρθρο N διαμορφώνεται ως εξής', so the current text of a provision lives in whichever issue last changed it, and the reader has to know which that is. It cannot be cited for the text of any article without first establishing that nothing has amended it. Two mechanical limits matter as well. The gazette has been set in two columns for most of its history, and the project's PDF extraction preserves the physical layout, so in a stored reading a line of the left column is followed immediately by a line of the right one - a quotation taken from an issue of 2024 or earlier has to fit inside a single line of a single column, around fifty characters. The layout changed to a single full-width column during 2025: the 2026 issues read as continuous prose and can be quoted at length. And issues from before roughly 2007 are set in fonts with a non-Unicode encoding: ΦΕΚ Α' 217 of 2004, which carries the Code of Greek Nationality, extracts entirely as Latin-1 mojibake and cannot be quoted at all. Gazette issues also carry one or two physically blank pages before the colophon, which a page-coverage check reports as empty. The host et.gr itself cannot be used: a request for the old /api/DownloadFeksApi/ endpoint is redirected to a bare IP address whose certificate no client can verify.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedΚώδικας Ελληνικής Ιθαγένειας (ν. 3284/2004), άρθρο 7 όπως αντικαταστάθηκε με το άρθρο 6 του ν. 4735/2020 · Άρθρο 7, παρ. 1
«ελληνικού πολιτισμού και θεσμών του πολιτεύματος»

The second paper. The subjects named in the same sentence are Greek history and geography, Greek culture and the institutions of the political system of the country.

Read it at the source
About this source

Greece's official publisher, a public service under the Presidency of the Government. It prints and circulates the Government Gazette, the Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως, in numbered series - Α' for laws, presidential decrees and acts of the Cabinet, Β' for ministerial decisions - and that is the whole of what it publishes. The address that matters is not et.gr. Its search application at search.et.gr builds every PDF link against an Azure storage account, and the live form is https://ia37rg02wpsa01.blob.core.windows.net/fek/<SS>/<YYYY>/<YYYY><SS><NNNNN>.pdf, where SS is the series number zero-padded to two digits, YYYY the year and NNNNN the issue number zero-padded to five: ΦΕΚ Α' 81 of 2023 is /fek/01/2023/20230100081.pdf, and ΦΕΚ Β' 3056 of 2013 is /fek/02/2013/20130203056.pdf. Every issue is a digitally signed PDF naming ΕΘΝΙΚΟ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ as its author, so what is served is the publisher's own artefact and not a mirror.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: It consolidates nothing. There is no official edition of any Greek statute as it now stands, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code, the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as currently in force. The practical substitute is a drafting convention rather than a service: an amending Act usually reprints the whole amended article under the formula 'και το άρθρο N διαμορφώνεται ως εξής', so the current text of a provision lives in whichever issue last changed it, and the reader has to know which that is. It cannot be cited for the text of any article without first establishing that nothing has amended it. Two mechanical limits matter as well. The gazette has been set in two columns for most of its history, and the project's PDF extraction preserves the physical layout, so in a stored reading a line of the left column is followed immediately by a line of the right one - a quotation taken from an issue of 2024 or earlier has to fit inside a single line of a single column, around fifty characters. The layout changed to a single full-width column during 2025: the 2026 issues read as continuous prose and can be quoted at length. And issues from before roughly 2007 are set in fonts with a non-Unicode encoding: ΦΕΚ Α' 217 of 2004, which carries the Code of Greek Nationality, extracts entirely as Latin-1 mojibake and cannot be quoted at all. Gazette issues also carry one or two physically blank pages before the colophon, which a page-coverage check reports as empty. The host et.gr itself cannot be used: a request for the old /api/DownloadFeksApi/ endpoint is redirected to a bare IP address whose certificate no client can verify.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedΚώδικας Ελληνικής Ιθαγένειας (ν. 3284/2004), άρθρο 6 όπως αντικαταστάθηκε με το άρθρο 5 του ν. 4735/2020 · Άρθρο 6, παρ. 1, περ. ζ
«Ηλεκτρονικό παράβολο πεντακοσίων πενήντα (550)»

The application fee, in euro. The same point reduces it to two hundred on a reapplication and to a hundred for ethnic Greeks, Union nationals, recognised political refugees and stateless persons.

Read it at the source
About this source

Greece's official publisher, a public service under the Presidency of the Government. It prints and circulates the Government Gazette, the Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως, in numbered series - Α' for laws, presidential decrees and acts of the Cabinet, Β' for ministerial decisions - and that is the whole of what it publishes. The address that matters is not et.gr. Its search application at search.et.gr builds every PDF link against an Azure storage account, and the live form is https://ia37rg02wpsa01.blob.core.windows.net/fek/<SS>/<YYYY>/<YYYY><SS><NNNNN>.pdf, where SS is the series number zero-padded to two digits, YYYY the year and NNNNN the issue number zero-padded to five: ΦΕΚ Α' 81 of 2023 is /fek/01/2023/20230100081.pdf, and ΦΕΚ Β' 3056 of 2013 is /fek/02/2013/20130203056.pdf. Every issue is a digitally signed PDF naming ΕΘΝΙΚΟ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ as its author, so what is served is the publisher's own artefact and not a mirror.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: It consolidates nothing. There is no official edition of any Greek statute as it now stands, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code, the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as currently in force. The practical substitute is a drafting convention rather than a service: an amending Act usually reprints the whole amended article under the formula 'και το άρθρο N διαμορφώνεται ως εξής', so the current text of a provision lives in whichever issue last changed it, and the reader has to know which that is. It cannot be cited for the text of any article without first establishing that nothing has amended it. Two mechanical limits matter as well. The gazette has been set in two columns for most of its history, and the project's PDF extraction preserves the physical layout, so in a stored reading a line of the left column is followed immediately by a line of the right one - a quotation taken from an issue of 2024 or earlier has to fit inside a single line of a single column, around fifty characters. The layout changed to a single full-width column during 2025: the 2026 issues read as continuous prose and can be quoted at length. And issues from before roughly 2007 are set in fonts with a non-Unicode encoding: ΦΕΚ Α' 217 of 2004, which carries the Code of Greek Nationality, extracts entirely as Latin-1 mojibake and cannot be quoted at all. Gazette issues also carry one or two physically blank pages before the colophon, which a page-coverage check reports as empty. The host et.gr itself cannot be used: a request for the old /api/DownloadFeksApi/ endpoint is redirected to a bare IP address whose certificate no client can verify.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedΚώδικας Ελληνικής Ιθαγένειας (ν. 3284/2004), άρθρο 6 όπως αντικαταστάθηκε με το άρθρο 5 του ν. 4735/2020 · Άρθρο 6, παρ. 1, περ. γ
«Πιστοποιητικό επάρκειας γνώσεων για»

The Certificate of Adequacy of Knowledge for Naturalisation, abbreviated Π.Ε.Γ.Π. in the statute, which is what the examination produces and which has to accompany the application.

Read it at the source
About this source

Greece's official publisher, a public service under the Presidency of the Government. It prints and circulates the Government Gazette, the Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως, in numbered series - Α' for laws, presidential decrees and acts of the Cabinet, Β' for ministerial decisions - and that is the whole of what it publishes. The address that matters is not et.gr. Its search application at search.et.gr builds every PDF link against an Azure storage account, and the live form is https://ia37rg02wpsa01.blob.core.windows.net/fek/<SS>/<YYYY>/<YYYY><SS><NNNNN>.pdf, where SS is the series number zero-padded to two digits, YYYY the year and NNNNN the issue number zero-padded to five: ΦΕΚ Α' 81 of 2023 is /fek/01/2023/20230100081.pdf, and ΦΕΚ Β' 3056 of 2013 is /fek/02/2013/20130203056.pdf. Every issue is a digitally signed PDF naming ΕΘΝΙΚΟ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ as its author, so what is served is the publisher's own artefact and not a mirror.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: It consolidates nothing. There is no official edition of any Greek statute as it now stands, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code, the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as currently in force. The practical substitute is a drafting convention rather than a service: an amending Act usually reprints the whole amended article under the formula 'και το άρθρο N διαμορφώνεται ως εξής', so the current text of a provision lives in whichever issue last changed it, and the reader has to know which that is. It cannot be cited for the text of any article without first establishing that nothing has amended it. Two mechanical limits matter as well. The gazette has been set in two columns for most of its history, and the project's PDF extraction preserves the physical layout, so in a stored reading a line of the left column is followed immediately by a line of the right one - a quotation taken from an issue of 2024 or earlier has to fit inside a single line of a single column, around fifty characters. The layout changed to a single full-width column during 2025: the 2026 issues read as continuous prose and can be quoted at length. And issues from before roughly 2007 are set in fonts with a non-Unicode encoding: ΦΕΚ Α' 217 of 2004, which carries the Code of Greek Nationality, extracts entirely as Latin-1 mojibake and cannot be quoted at all. Gazette issues also carry one or two physically blank pages before the colophon, which a page-coverage check reports as empty. The host et.gr itself cannot be used: a request for the old /api/DownloadFeksApi/ endpoint is redirected to a bare IP address whose certificate no client can verify.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Practical notes

Greece publishes no consolidated text of the Code of Greek Nationality. Every provision here is quoted from the Act that last replaced it - Law 3838/2010 for article 5, Law 4735/2020 for articles 5A, 6 and 7 - and the 2004 gazette that carries the Code as enacted could not be read at all: its PDF has no Unicode text layer, so every Greek character in it extracts as a Latin-1 misreading.

Because of that, this record cannot say that nothing has amended article 5 since 2010. What it says is that nothing found in the search behind these records did, and that the three instruments read are the ones that put the present wording in place.

The route by birth and schooling in Greece is a separate one, in article 1A of the Nationality Code as replaced by article 1 of Law 4332/2015, and is not written up here.

Nothing in the provisions read requires renunciation of an existing nationality.

Sources2 · all accessed 2026-10-10
  • issues
    Νόμος 3838/2010, ΦΕΚ Α' 49/24.03.2010, article 2 of which replaced article 5 of the Code of Greek Nationality

    Εθνικό Τυπογραφείο (National Printing House), Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως

    About this source

    Greece's official publisher, a public service under the Presidency of the Government. It prints and circulates the Government Gazette, the Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως, in numbered series - Α' for laws, presidential decrees and acts of the Cabinet, Β' for ministerial decisions - and that is the whole of what it publishes. The address that matters is not et.gr. Its search application at search.et.gr builds every PDF link against an Azure storage account, and the live form is https://ia37rg02wpsa01.blob.core.windows.net/fek/<SS>/<YYYY>/<YYYY><SS><NNNNN>.pdf, where SS is the series number zero-padded to two digits, YYYY the year and NNNNN the issue number zero-padded to five: ΦΕΚ Α' 81 of 2023 is /fek/01/2023/20230100081.pdf, and ΦΕΚ Β' 3056 of 2013 is /fek/02/2013/20130203056.pdf. Every issue is a digitally signed PDF naming ΕΘΝΙΚΟ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ as its author, so what is served is the publisher's own artefact and not a mirror.

    Standing: Issues the instrument

    Cannot be cited for: It consolidates nothing. There is no official edition of any Greek statute as it now stands, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code, the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as currently in force. The practical substitute is a drafting convention rather than a service: an amending Act usually reprints the whole amended article under the formula 'και το άρθρο N διαμορφώνεται ως εξής', so the current text of a provision lives in whichever issue last changed it, and the reader has to know which that is. It cannot be cited for the text of any article without first establishing that nothing has amended it. Two mechanical limits matter as well. The gazette has been set in two columns for most of its history, and the project's PDF extraction preserves the physical layout, so in a stored reading a line of the left column is followed immediately by a line of the right one - a quotation taken from an issue of 2024 or earlier has to fit inside a single line of a single column, around fifty characters. The layout changed to a single full-width column during 2025: the 2026 issues read as continuous prose and can be quoted at length. And issues from before roughly 2007 are set in fonts with a non-Unicode encoding: ΦΕΚ Α' 217 of 2004, which carries the Code of Greek Nationality, extracts entirely as Latin-1 mojibake and cannot be quoted at all. Gazette issues also carry one or two physically blank pages before the colophon, which a page-coverage check reports as empty. The host et.gr itself cannot be used: a request for the old /api/DownloadFeksApi/ endpoint is redirected to a bare IP address whose certificate no client can verify.

    We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

  • issues
    Νόμος 4735/2020, ΦΕΚ Α' 197/12.10.2020, amending the Code of Greek Nationality

    Εθνικό Τυπογραφείο (National Printing House), Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως

    About this source

    Greece's official publisher, a public service under the Presidency of the Government. It prints and circulates the Government Gazette, the Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως, in numbered series - Α' for laws, presidential decrees and acts of the Cabinet, Β' for ministerial decisions - and that is the whole of what it publishes. The address that matters is not et.gr. Its search application at search.et.gr builds every PDF link against an Azure storage account, and the live form is https://ia37rg02wpsa01.blob.core.windows.net/fek/<SS>/<YYYY>/<YYYY><SS><NNNNN>.pdf, where SS is the series number zero-padded to two digits, YYYY the year and NNNNN the issue number zero-padded to five: ΦΕΚ Α' 81 of 2023 is /fek/01/2023/20230100081.pdf, and ΦΕΚ Β' 3056 of 2013 is /fek/02/2013/20130203056.pdf. Every issue is a digitally signed PDF naming ΕΘΝΙΚΟ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ as its author, so what is served is the publisher's own artefact and not a mirror.

    Standing: Issues the instrument

    Cannot be cited for: It consolidates nothing. There is no official edition of any Greek statute as it now stands, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code, the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as currently in force. The practical substitute is a drafting convention rather than a service: an amending Act usually reprints the whole amended article under the formula 'και το άρθρο N διαμορφώνεται ως εξής', so the current text of a provision lives in whichever issue last changed it, and the reader has to know which that is. It cannot be cited for the text of any article without first establishing that nothing has amended it. Two mechanical limits matter as well. The gazette has been set in two columns for most of its history, and the project's PDF extraction preserves the physical layout, so in a stored reading a line of the left column is followed immediately by a line of the right one - a quotation taken from an issue of 2024 or earlier has to fit inside a single line of a single column, around fifty characters. The layout changed to a single full-width column during 2025: the 2026 issues read as continuous prose and can be quoted at length. And issues from before roughly 2007 are set in fonts with a non-Unicode encoding: ΦΕΚ Α' 217 of 2004, which carries the Code of Greek Nationality, extracts entirely as Latin-1 mojibake and cannot be quoted at all. Gazette issues also carry one or two physically blank pages before the colophon, which a page-coverage check reports as empty. The host et.gr itself cannot be used: a request for the old /api/DownloadFeksApi/ endpoint is redirected to a bare IP address whose certificate no client can verify.

    We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source