The apostille, explained: legalising your documents for a wedding in Greece

What an apostille actually is

An apostille is a standardised certificate, defined by the 1961 Hague Convention, that authenticates the origin of a public document. It confirms that the signature and seal on your birth certificate belong to an official who genuinely holds that office. That is all it does.

It says nothing about what the document contains. It is not a translation. It is not a notarisation — a notary certifies a copy or a signature, an apostille certifies the notary. And it cannot be obtained abroad: an apostille is issued by the country that issued the document, so a British birth certificate is apostilled in the United Kingdom, never in Greece.

Which documents need one

For a Greek civil wedding, the documents that carry an apostille are the ones proving identity and freedom to marry:

• Certificate of no impediment to marriage — the one that matters most, and the one with the shortest shelf life — see below.
• Full birth certificate — long form, not the abbreviated version.
• Final divorce decree — if either of you has been married before.
• Death certificate of a former spouse — if either of you is widowed.
• Any change-of-name deed — if the name on your passport does not match the name on your birth certificate.

Your passport is not apostilled — a photocopy is enough. Neither is the newspaper announcement, which is a Greek document produced locally.

Who issues it, by country

The pattern to notice: it is almost never a single national office, and for federal countries it is the state or province, not the capital. A US couple with a Californian birth certificate and a Texan divorce decree needs two different Secretaries of State.

The order of operations

This is the part worth reading twice, because doing it backwards is the single most common and most expensive mistake in the whole file.

1. Obtain the document — in its long or full form, recently issued.
2. Apostille it — in the country that issued it.
3. Translate it into Greek — by a translator Greece accepts — the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs translation service, a Greek sworn translator, or a Greek lawyer certified to translate.

One more sequencing trap: a certificate of no impediment is typically treated as valid for three to six months, and some municipalities want it issued within three. Do not obtain it first. Do the slow, long-lived documents — birth certificate, divorce decree — early, and leave the CNI until roughly two to three months before the wedding.

How long to allow, and what it costs

Apostille turnaround is the variable you control least. Standard service in most countries runs from a few days to several weeks, and expedited services exist nearly everywhere at a premium. Certified Greek translation adds a few days on top.

A workable rule: start the document file three to four months before the wedding, and treat any step that involves a government office as taking twice as long as its published estimate. Nothing here is expensive — apostilles are typically tens of euros per document — but nothing here can be hurried at the last minute either.