Emergency numbers in Greece: calling an ambulance on 112 or 166

Greece keeps two live emergency numbers rather than folding everything into one, and both of them will get you an ambulance.

The clearest official statement of that sits on the Hellenic national contact point for cross-border healthcare, run by EOPYY. Its urgent care page, last updated on 29 November 2024, states: "When an emergency ambulance transport is required, you can dial 112 (EU-Helpline) or 166 (National Centre for Emergency Care – EKAV) to be transported to a public hospital on-call duty." That single sentence answers the question most people arrive with.

112 is the European emergency number. The European Commission's policy page on 112, last updated on 23 June 2026, states that "112 is the European emergency phone number, available everywhere in the EU, free of charge", that it became the single European emergency number in 1991, and that it "functions alongside existing national emergency numbers". Greece is one of the countries where it does run alongside a national number rather than replacing it, which is exactly why 166 still matters.

166 reaches EKAB, the National Centre for Emergency Care, transliterated as EKAV on some official English pages. The Greek Ministry of Health's 166 EKAB page puts the trigger plainly: "Καλείτε το 166 όταν χρειάζεται άμεση βοήθεια μεταφοράς σε νοσοκομείο", call 166 when immediate assistance with transport to hospital is needed. The same page states that "Καλείτε το 166 ατελώς", that you call 166 free of charge, whether from a payphone or an ordinary line.

The practical rule for a household: teach everyone 112, because it works across the whole of Europe and nobody has to remember which country they are in. Put 166 in your phone as well, because it is the direct line to the ambulance service and it costs nothing to have both.

EKAB is the national ambulance service, and the EOPYY urgent care page describes two things about it that a new arrival should know before they need either.

First, the transport itself. The page states that "Emergency ambulance transportation is provided free of charge by EKAV." That is a statement about the transport, not about everything that happens afterwards, and the difference matters enough that we have given it its own section further down.

Second, the air ambulance. The same page describes air ambulance transport as EKAV's responsibility and states that it is free of charge in most cases, giving the example of urgent transport from an island to the mainland because of a life-threatening health condition. The page notes that Greece has more than 150 inhabited islands, which is the reason this exists as a service rather than an exception.

There is one piece of guidance on the Ministry of Health's 166 page that is unusual enough to be worth repeating exactly as it is meant. The Ministry advises citizens to make their own way to the nearest available hospital where that is possible, so that ambulance resources are kept for people in greater need. Read that as an instruction about proportion rather than about severity. Chest pain, stroke signs, a serious fall, a bad allergic reaction, an accident with casualties: call. A child with a high temperature at eleven at night, when there is a car outside and an adult who can drive it, is a different call to make.

This is the part of Greek emergency care that catches people out, because it does not work the way an American or British household expects.

The EOPYY page states that an emergency ambulance transports you "to a public hospital on-call duty". Greek hospitals take emergency admissions on a rota rather than all of them being open to walk-in emergencies at once. So the hospital you end up in is the one that is on duty at that hour, which may not be the nearest one to your front door and may not be the one you would have chosen.

You can also present yourself. The same page states: "In emergencies, you can go directly to a public hospital on-call duty or an EOPYY-contracted hospital." The words "on-call duty" are doing real work in that sentence. Turning up at a public hospital that is not on the rota is not the same journey.

Two things to sort out in your first month, neither of which takes long:

• Find out where the on-duty schedule for your area is published. The Ministry of Health's citizen pages carry links to hospital on-call schedules alongside pharmacy and doctor rotas, and your local health authority publishes the roster for its own region.
• Write down the Greek name and Greek address of the public hospital nearest you, and of the one you would expect to be sent to. A name copied by hand from a browser translation is a name a taxi driver cannot act on.

If you live on an island, ask a different question. Ask which mainland or larger-island hospital serious cases are transferred to from where you live, and how people get there. That answer is more useful to know in advance than any phone number.

The Ministry of Health's 166 page sets out what the operator needs, and the list is short: your telephone number, details of your location, and information about the number of casualties. It adds a specific instruction for mobile callers, which is to state your region, because a mobile call does not carry a fixed address the way a landline does.

That last point deserves more weight than the Ministry gives it, because it is the single most common failure mode for a foreign caller in Greece. You are ringing from a mobile, possibly on a foreign SIM, possibly from a village whose name you have only ever seen transliterated. Have three things ready:

• The region and the nearest town, said the Greek way. Not the way a booking site spelled it.
• A landmark. A church, a square, a petrol station, a hotel, a junction. Landmarks survive language gaps better than street numbers do.
• Your own number. They will call you back, and on an island or a mountain road that call-back is often how the crew finds you.

On language, we would rather be honest than encouraging. The European Commission's 112 page states that "Operators in many countries can answer the calls not only in their national language, but also in English or French", but that is a statement about many countries and not a statement about Greece specifically, and we did not find an official Greek page confirming the language position for 112 or 166. We tried: the gov.gr service pages for 112 and 166 and the Civil Protection Ministry's 112 pages all refused automated access when we checked them on 7 August 2026. Open those pages yourself in a browser, or verify with the General Secretariat for Civil Protection, rather than taking a promise from us.

The practical hedge costs nothing. Keep your address written in Greek characters somewhere every member of the household can find it, and if you have a Greek-speaking neighbour, know which door to knock on.

Greece runs several other national three and four digit lines. We are only going to name the ones we could confirm on an official page, and we are going to tell you where to check the rest.

The Greek Ministry of Health publishes a useful telephones and addresses index for citizens. Alongside 166 for EKAB, it lists a Poison Control Centre line, the National Centre for Social Solidarity on 197, a psychological support line, transplant organisation lines, and SOS helplines for addiction and for children, teenagers and parents. If you have children in the house, the poison centre number from that index is one to save now rather than to search for while holding a bottle.

What we are not going to do is print a tidy table of police, fire and coastguard numbers from memory. The official list lives on the Greek government's national emergency numbers service pages on gov.gr, and those pages returned an access error to our automated check on 7 August 2026, so we could not read them. Open the gov.gr national emergency numbers page in a browser and take the current list from there, or verify with the General Secretariat for Civil Protection. An out-of-date emergency number on a page like this one would be worse than no number at all.

None of that changes the headline. For a medical emergency, 112 and 166 are both confirmed by official sources and both reach an ambulance.

Most people asking about emergency numbers in Greece are asking a second question underneath the first: what happens to us if this occurs before our paperwork is finished?

Here is what the official pages actually say, and where they stop. The EOPYY national contact point page is written for holders of a European Health Insurance Card and for EU citizens affiliated with Greek statutory insurance. For that group it states that "Hospital treatment is free in ESY-hospitals", that at an EOPYY-contracted private clinic the patient "will be expected to pay co-payment for part of the hospitalization cost", and that someone without that cover attending a private provider with no EOPYY contract "will have to pay privately for all costs". EOPYY's access page adds that EHIC holders, or EU citizens affiliated with the Greek statutory system, can access ESY hospitals free of charge by presenting the EHIC or EU-AMKA together with an identity document.

Notice what those sentences are conditioned on. They describe people who already hold a card or a Greek social security number. The pages we read do not set out what a third country national who has just arrived on a residence permit and has no AMKA yet will be charged for hospital treatment. That is a real gap, not an oversight on our part, and we are not going to fill it with a guess. Ask EOPYY directly or check with your local hospital's administration office (verify with EOPYY and the Greek Ministry of Health).

UK government guidance on healthcare in Greece, last updated on 21 October 2021 and therefore old enough to treat as shape rather than detail, points the same way. It states that treatment in a state hospital is free if you have been referred by an EOPYY doctor or health centre, that at an EOPYY-contracted private clinic only part of the cost is covered by the state with a co-payment towards the rest, and that if you are not working and do not have a registered S1 form you will have to take out private health insurance.

Reaching an ambulance and paying for what happens after it arrives are two separate problems, and the second one is the one that outlasts your first month.

The gap is structural rather than unusual. Entitlement in Greece runs through an AMKA and registration with EOPYY, and those take time to obtain after arrival. Until they are in place, the routes the official pages describe, presenting an EHIC or an EU-AMKA at an ESY hospital, are not routes a newly landed family on a residence permit can use. Private medical cover taken for a residence application or for a first year in Greece is what is designed to carry medical costs across that period.

Because emergency care is where a policy is genuinely tested, three parts of the wording are worth reading before anything goes wrong rather than after. Look at how emergency treatment and emergency hospital admission are handled and whether any waiting period applies to them. Look at whether ambulance and inter-hospital transfer are listed benefits, which matters far more if you are living on an island than if you are living in Athens. And look at the notification clause, because many policies ask you or a family member to contact the insurer within a set number of hours of an emergency admission, and that is an easy thing to miss on the worst day of your year.

None of that should slow the call down. You dial 112 or 166 first and open the policy afterwards. What cover changes is who carries the cost of the treatment, not whether you are able to ring.

Keep every piece of paper. The hospital admission note, the discharge summary and the itemised invoice are what any claim will ask for, and in Greece they are considerably easier to collect on the day than by email a month later.