An EEA Licence Swaps Over Without a Test, a Swiss One Lasts Twelve Months, and Everything Else Starts from the Beginning
Answer
The general rule applies to you
No exception is recorded for citizens of Panama on this topic. That is the answer, not a gap - everything below is the rule you get, unchanged.
147 exceptions recorded across 54 countries · none match Panama to Greece · Driving and licence exchange
Presidential Decree 51/2012 transposes Directive 2006/126 and settles the easy half. Valid licences issued by a member state of the Union or by Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein are recognised in Greece and let their holders drive the corresponding categories; such a licence is exchanged for a Greek one of the same categories with no medical, theory or practical test, provided it has not expired, the holder has normal residence in Greece or has been a student or pupil here for at least six months in the last twelve, the age condition is met, and no other Greek or EEA licence is held. The hard half is everywhere else. The ministerial decision that governs licensing, Α3/οικ.50984/7947 of 2013, has only one conversion article for a non-EEA country, and it is Switzerland: a Swiss licence is valid in Greece for twelve months from the holder's entry and must then be converted, with two medical certificates, into a Greek licence. Anyone else applies for a Greek licence from scratch and sits the examinations, and the same decision says so sideways - a person holding a third-country licence who is not entitled to convert it must declare its number and the issuing country and hand it in, and it is kept on file until the Greek licence is issued. A non-Greek applicant must also produce a public document certifying normal residence in Greece, issued at least 185 days before the application.
At a glance
- Licences recognised without more
- Those of a Union member state, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein
Article 3(2) of Presidential Decree 51/2012.
- Exchange of an EEA licence
- No medical, theory or practical test
Article 10(2) of Presidential Decree 51/2012, subject to article 9 and to the conditions in the same paragraph.
- Residence condition for the exchange
- Normal residence in Greece, or six months as a student or pupil in the last twelve
Article 10(2)(b) of Presidential Decree 51/2012.
- Stamp duties on the exchange
- Not payable at the exchange; they fall due when the Greek licence is renewed
Article 10(2) of Presidential Decree 51/2012, final paragraph.
- A Swiss licence
- Valid as it stands for 12 months from entry, then must be converted
Article 11(1) and (2) of ministerial decision Α3/οικ.50984/7947 of 2013.
- Any other third-country licence
- No conversion article in the 2013 decision; the holder applies for a Greek licence and sits the examinations
Article 11 of ministerial decision Α3/οικ.50984/7947 of 2013 is the only conversion article for a non-EEA state and covers Switzerland alone. Article 2(1)(a) of the same decision requires a holder not entitled to convert to surrender the foreign licence with the application.
- Residence document for a non-Greek applicant
- Issued at least 185 days before the application
Article 2(1)(c) of ministerial decision Α3/οικ.50984/7947 of 2013, which names the residence permit, the EU registration certificate, the permanent residence document, the receipt for a type A permit and the Special Identity Card of an ethnic Greek.
Requirements
- For an EEA licence, normal residence in Greece or six months as a student or pupil in the last twelve
- For an EEA licence, that it has not expired and that no other Greek or EEA licence is held
- For a Swiss licence, conversion before twelve months from entry have passed, with two medical certificates
- For any other third-country licence, the full Greek theory and practical examinations
- For a non-Greek applicant, a residence document issued at least 185 days before the application
Country-level policy
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.
What applies to you
Nothing changes for a citizen of Panama
We have no rule recorded that treats your citizenship differently here, so the general rule above is the one that applies to you. That is an answer, not a gap.
What the law says
«στην Ελλάδα και επιτρέπουν στους κατόχους τους»Recognition. The sentence opens by naming valid licences issued by a member state of the Union or by Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein, and closes by letting the holder drive vehicles of the corresponding categories or sub-categories.
Read it at the sourceAbout 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
«Νορβηγία, Ισλανδία, Λιχτενστάιν»The three non-Union states Greece treats as if they were member states for this purpose. Switzerland is not among them.
Read it at the sourceAbout 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
«χωρίς εξέταση ιατρική, θεωρητική και προσόντων και»The exchange, free of every test. The word completing the phrase on the next line of the same column is "συμπεριφοράς".
Read it at the sourceAbout 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
«ο κάτοχος της άδειας οδήγησης έχει την κανονική»The residence condition, which continues "του διαμονή στην Ελλάδα ή την ιδιότητα του σπουδαστή ή του μαθητή επί έξι (6) τουλάχιστον μήνες" over the following lines of the same column.
Read it at the sourceAbout 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
«Ελβετία, ισχύουν ως έχουν επί του ελληνικού εδάφους»The Swiss rule. The line closes with "επί 12 μήνες από την είσοδο", and paragraph 2 makes conversion compulsory once those twelve months are up.
Read it at the sourceAbout 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
«οδήγησης παύει να ισχύει στην Ελλάδα»What happens at the end of the twelve months: the Swiss licence ceases to be valid in Greece and the holder is obliged to convert it into a Greek licence of the corresponding category.
Read it at the sourceAbout 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
«έχει εκδοθεί από τρίτη χώρα και δεν δικαιούται να τη»The sideways answer for everyone else. The clause continues "μετατρέψει σε ελληνική" and obliges the applicant to declare the licence number and issuing country and to hand the licence in with the rest of the file, where it stays until the Greek licence is issued.
Read it at the sourceAbout 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
«185 τουλάχιστον ημέρες, πριν από την ημέρα κατάθεσης»The age of the residence document, not of the residence. A permit issued last week does not satisfy it however long the holder has been in Greece.
Read it at the sourceAbout 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
«την κανονική διαμονή του στην Ελλάδα, όπως είναι η»The documents that prove normal residence are listed by name on the lines that follow: the residence permit, the EU citizen's registration certificate, the permanent residence certification, the receipt for a type A permit, and the Special Identity Card of an ethnic Greek.
Read it at the sourceAbout 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 makes conversion arrangements with individual third countries by separate ministerial decisions. None of those was found or read, so this record says what the 2013 licensing decision contains - one conversion article, for Switzerland - and not that no other arrangement exists anywhere.
Ministerial decision Α3/οικ.50984/7947 is quoted as published in the second series of the gazette in December 2013. It has been amended since; no amending instrument was read, and Greece publishes no consolidated text.
How long a visitor may drive on a foreign licence before any of this bites is in the Highway Code, Law 2696/1999, which was not read.
The theory examination is taken in a language chosen from those available in the computerised system for examining candidate drivers, and the choice is declared in the application itself under article 2(1)(a) of the 2013 decision.
- issuesΠροεδρικό Διάταγμα 51/2012, ΦΕΚ Α' 101/27.04.2012
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
- issuesΥπουργική απόφαση Α3/οικ.50984/7947, ΦΕΚ Β' 3056/02.12.2013
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