🌍 How Rare Are You in Greece?
🇬🇷 Genetic Landscape of Greece
Greece has been a genetic crossroads of East and West for over 4,000 years. Modern Greeks carry ancient Mycenaean and Minoan DNA alongside Slavic, Ottoman Turkish, Albanian, and Anatolian Greek heritage. The islands of the Aegean show genetic isolation effects, with some islands maintaining distinct profiles. Crete has a particularly unique genetic signature. Greeks show a Mediterranean genetic profile with higher green eye frequency than expected and significant phenotypic diversity between northern mainland and island populations.
Surnames here still carry a return address. The ending -akis points to Crete, -opoulos to the Peloponnese, -idis and -iadis to families who came from Pontus on the Black Sea coast and elsewhere in Asia Minor, and -oglou to Anatolian roots picked up under Ottoman rule. First names narrow things further: the old custom of naming a firstborn son for his paternal grandfather means a single village can hold a dozen men with identical names, told apart only by nicknames. Dialect follows the same logic of separation. Tsakonian, spoken in a handful of villages in the eastern Peloponnese, descends from ancient Doric rather than from the Attic Greek behind the modern standard, and Cretan and Cypriot speech stay distinct enough to be placed within a sentence.
🪪 The one trait Greece will print on your ID card
The layout of a Greek identity card is set by joint ministerial decision, and the decisions are specific. The one signed by the Deputy Ministers of Interior and Finance as 8200/0-297647, published in the Government Gazette (ΦΕΚ) B’ 1476 on 27 April 2018, divides the card in its Article 3 into seven zones, the seventh being the machine-readable strip. Zone 6 carries father’s name, mother’s name, place of birth, date of issue, the social security number (Α.Μ.Κ.Α.) — and “Ομάδα αίματος / Blood type (προαιρετικά)”. Optional. That word appears against the blood group and against nothing else in Article 3.
A later joint ministerial decision, ΦΕΚ B’ 824 of 17 February 2023, reset the layout for the card Greece has issued since September 2023, and the blood group is still marked optional on it. So of the traits on this page, the blood group is the only one the Greek state offers to put on the document at all, and only if you ask for it. Eye and hair colour had their turn: cards issued before 2005 also printed profession, religion, address, spouse’s name, head shape, a right-hand index fingerprint, and eye and hair colour. Those fields came off after 2005 on privacy grounds or as no longer necessary for identification.
👁️ Eye Color
| Brown | 50% |
| Hazel | 15% |
| Green | 13% |
| Blue | 15% |
| Gray | 7% |
💇 Hair Color
| Dark Brown | 35% |
| Brown | 25% |
| Black | 20% |
| Blonde | 10% |
| Red | 2% |
| Gray | 8% |
🩸 Blood Type
| O+ | 38% |
| A+ | 32% |
| B+ | 9% |
| AB+ | 4% |
| O- | 7% |
| A- | 6% |
| B- | 2% |
| AB- | 2% |
Trait frequencies on this page come from public and institutional datasets — see Data Sources.
🧮 Calculate Your Rarity in Greece
Pick your eye colour, hair colour and blood type. The calculator uses Greece's own figures from the tables above, not world averages.
This is an estimate, not a measurement. It multiplies three national frequencies as if they were independent, and they are not: eye and hair colour share pigmentation genes, so a combination that tends to run together, such as blue eyes with blonde hair, is more common than the multiplication suggests, while one that rarely does, such as blue eyes with black hair, is rarer. Blood type is independent of both. The frequencies are national averages from public datasets — see Data Sources.
That number describes the body you were born with. Fraeon, our other site, does the same arithmetic for the part you chose: the films, series, games, books, anime and manga you have actually finished. Start your log →
🔤 Georgios, Yorgos, Giorgos: which one gets counted?
How many people share your name depends on which alphabet you count in, and in Greece a published standard settles the Latin half of it. The Latin transcription of a Greek name for a passport comes from ELOT 743, which the passport service describes as equivalent to ISO 843, and the National Passport and Secure Document Center publishes the converter that applies it: type the Greek into the left box, read the Latin out of the right. It sits among the service’s tools as “Transcription of Greek Names based on ELOT-743 standard”.
One Greek spelling, one Latin spelling, decided by a table rather than by the holder. Away from the passport there is no such table, and a Greek name travels in Latin script in more than one form at a time — on a bank card, a boarding pass, a family tree kept abroad. Count a name in Greek script and you count one group; count it in Latin and that group splits across spellings, none of them wrong. Any name-rarity number for Greece is a number about a spelling as much as about a name.
🗂️ Filed as a household, not as a person
Every percentage on this page rests on a prior question: counted where, and by whom? Greece answers with the δημοτολόγιο, the municipal register. An application to be registered goes to the Municipal Register Service of the municipality where the registration will take place, or to any Citizen Service Centre (KEP), and the Ministry of Interior is the competent body for the procedure. In the published description of first registration for an adult, the Mayor’s decision for registration is drawn up, and the competent employee “creates a new entry in the municipal register and family register, or registers the applicant in an existing one”. The act updates the Μητρώο Πολιτών, the Citizens Registry.
The second register is the part worth noticing. Alongside the individual entry sits the οικογενειακή μερίδα, the family register, so a Greek citizen is filed inside a household as well as on their own, and a mayor signs them in. It is a fussier arrangement than one national list of names, and it is the machinery underneath any Greek headcount.
⭐ Rare Facts About Greece
Where the figures on this page come from
The population is the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT) and its 2021 Population-Housing Census. The height figure follows NCD-RisC, “A century of trends in adult human height” (eLife, 2016), which pooled 1,472 population-based studies across 200 countries for people born between 1896 and 1996. The eye, hair and blood splits are estimates from public datasets, not official statistics: we found none of them in ELSTAT’s published statistics, and no national ABO/Rh breakdown published by Εθνικό Κέντρο Αιμοδοσίας (ΕΚΕΑ), Greece’s national blood body. More at Data Sources. Last checked September 2026.