Europe/Athens

TZ identifier and aliases

Europe/Athens is the canonical identifier for Greek civil time. The abbreviation EET (Eastern European Time) is an older name still pointing at the same rules but is a deprecated alias — use Europe/Athens in new code.

UTC offset and DST rule

Europe/Athens is +02:00 (EET) on standard time and +03:00 (EEST) during daylight saving, following the EU-harmonized clock-change dates — the last Sunday in March through the last Sunday in October, both at 1am UTC — even though its base offset (Eastern European Time) is one hour ahead of the Central European Time used by most of the EU's larger members.

Using it in cron, CI and Postgres

Set TZ=Europe/Athens for a process that should schedule by Greek local time — worth flagging explicitly since "European time" in most developers' mental model defaults to Central European Time (+01:00/+02:00), and Greece's Eastern European base offset is a full hour ahead of that assumption. Postgres accepts it via SET TIME ZONE 'Europe/Athens'; or the timezone setting, applying the DST rule correctly for any date. Where a scheduler supports a CRON_TZ=Europe/Athens line, jobs run by local time directly; GitHub Actions' schedule: trigger always evaluates in UTC, so a fixed-local-hour job needs its UTC equivalent updated across each DST boundary. Avoid the 3:00–4:00am local window for anything that must run exactly once — that's when the actual clock change lands in Athens, one hour later than in the Central European zones.

History and quirks

Greece has used Eastern European Time since 1916, placing it in the same offset family as Finland, the Baltic states, Ukraine and Egypt rather than its immediate EU neighbors Italy and Bulgaria's western border partners — a boundary that runs straight through the middle of the Balkans and reflects historical alignment with the Ottoman-successor states of the eastern Mediterranean more than with Western Europe. Greece adopted the EU's harmonized DST directive along with every other member state, so while its base offset differs from Germany's or France's, its clock-change dates are identical — a useful distinction for anyone building scheduling logic: "same DST calendar" doesn't imply "same UTC offset" across the EU, and Athens is the clearest example of that in this batch.

Greece's many islands add a small logistical footnote rather than a real time zone complication: despite being scattered across a wide stretch of the Aegean and Ionian seas, every inhabited Greek island uses the same Europe/Athens civil time as the mainland, with no island-specific exceptions in the tz database — unlike, say, Indonesia or the Canary Islands, where island geography does produce a separate zone. Greece's alignment with EET rather than CET also means it shares its exact base offset with Egypt and several Eastern European states even without sharing a land border or close political ties with any of them, a reminder that offset clusters often trace historical spheres of influence more than current-day geography.

Offsets and DST transitions on this page are computed from the IANA time zone database bundled with your browser; the rules described above were verified against tzdata 2026b when this page was published.