According to Citizen Protection Minister Notis Mitarachis, Greece’s new identity cards will soon be available to the public. In an interview with ERT, he stated that the cards, which are the size of a credit card, will be issued from mid-September for those who apply for them now.

“Our goal is to present them to the general public at the International Exhibition of Thessaloniki in early September,” he said, with distribution beginning the next day.

The existing identity cards will remain valid for ten years and can be used as a travel document. The new cards will now officially indicate their validity for travel purposes. The logic going forward will be to reissue both the ID card and passport every ten years through a unified application system. “There is no intention to change the cost of issuing a new identity card, nor the cost of a passport,” the Minister added.

The new identity cards will be made of plastic, similar to a bank card, and will feature a microchip containing the owner’s biometric data. They will include a photograph, gender, nationality, and the name of the holder. The fingerprint information will be stored in electronic form, concealed within the card.

The estimated cost for replacing the old certificates with the new ones is around 80 million euros. Each new document will cost citizens 7 euros, plus the cost of a photo. The transition to the new cards will begin in Attica and then expand to the rest of the country. Identity cards for individuals over twelve years of age will be valid for fifteen years. To renew an identity card, individuals need to submit an application to the authority that issued the previous card, as an expired card becomes invalid.