Which Document Can Be A Will In Greece
By Christos ILIOPOULOS*
Athens, 16 April 2023
What can be legally considered a Will in Greece by jurists, notaries, the tax office and the administration is determined by Greek law. Legal documents which are considered a perfectly valid Will in other countries, is not always certain that they will be accepted as a Will in Greece. The three possible categories of a Will in Greece are the following:
1. A holographic or handwritten Will. This is a document written by the testator (the person who is making the Will), on any piece of paper, which however must be entirely handwritten. This document must be entirely written by the hand of the testator. It cannot have any printed or typed words or text. If the document contains printed parts, or parts which are handwritten by others than the testator, it is not a Will in Greece, even if it is signed by the testator, and even if the testator has written on it that he/she approves of the part of the text, which is written by someone else. The document must also contain the full name of the testator, the date the document is being drafted and the signature of the testator at the end of the text. Sometimes, if the date is missing, it can be replaced by other, indirect, entries in the Will and thus the document can be “saved” as a Will, even if it does not have a clear date.
The document does not necessarily have to contain the title “Will” or “Last Testament and Will” or something similar. As long as it satisfies the minimum requirements to be a Will, it can be considered as such. Thus, the piece of paper could be even a letter written by the person who died to someone else, where the writer of the document outlines his/her wishes with regards to his/her property and assets, after his/her passing. As long as it states the name of the person who wrote it and a date, and it is handwritten, it can be a Will. If a standard signature is missing, (because people do not usually sign a letter they send to someone else), the entry of the handwritten name of the writer at the end of the letter could be considered a signature.
It does not matter in what language the handwritten document is written. It could be Greek, or any other known language, as long as the text can be officially translated in Greek and presented to the Greek court for probation, so it can obtain legal validity as a Will.
2. A public Will is signed by the testator before a notary (who is a fully professional jurist in Greece), in a formal way, as an officially notarized act in the presence of three witnesses or one witness and a second notary. In this case, the testator provides the lawyer or the notary with his/her wishes and they come up with a first draft of the Will. Once the final draft is fully accepted by the testator, the printed document is signed by the testator and the notary, along with the witnesses and its hardcopy is registered and filed at the notary’s office. If the notary’s commission expires, by law there is always another notary who takes over the archive of the notary with all the officially recorded acts, including the public Will of the testator.
After the passing of the testator, the Will is filed at the court and it is eventually probated by it. The heirs or next of kin of the deceased must know the name of the notary where the testator had made his/her Will, in order to find the public Will and have it probated. If they know or suspect the deceased had made a public Will, but are not aware of the name of the notary, they can file a written request with the notaries’ association and a search is done with a notice sent to all notaries with the name of the deceased.
3. A document written and signed by the testator, or written by another person or typed, but signed by the testator, is enclosed in a file and is handed over to a notary. If the document is written by another person or if it is typed, it must have the signature of the testator on every page. The testator appears at the notary’s office, has his/her id confirmed, hands over the closed envelope and signs the related notarial act (secret Will). Three witnesses, or a second notary and one witness are by law required to be present. The notary keeps it as a recorded act and the envelope is opened by the court after the passing of the testator, when the court probates it as a Will.
If a person has assets in Greece (real estate, movables of value, single – name bank accounts) and wants to make a Will to distribute them, the best course of action is possibly to make a Will, which falls into one of the above three categories of Wills in Greek law. If this person has already signed a Will in another country, in most cases after his/her passing, the foreign Will once probated in that other country, can also be subsequently probated and become valid in Greece, too, so the heirs can use the foreign Will to inherit assets located in Greece. However, there are cases where the legal wording of the foreign Will is not easy to be legally implemented in Greece, the most usual example being the use of the notion of the “Trust” in the foreign Will. This sometimes causes difficulties, or more rarely deadlocks, with the foreign Will not being possible to be legally applied by lawyers, notaries, the tax office and other state authorities in Greece. To minimize this risk, one possible suggestion is the testator to make a separate section in his foreign Will, where he will state his wishes for property exclusively located in Greece, after he has consulted with a Greek lawyer. Another option is to make a separate, Greek Will in Greece, which deals exclusively or primarily with assets in Greece.
*Christos ILIOPOULOS, attorney at
the Supreme Court of Greece , LL.M.
e-mail: bm-bioxoi@otenet.gr
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