Which Countries National Anthem Has No Words?

Of the roughly 200 national anthems in current use, four have no official lyrics: Spain's Marcha Real, San Marino's Terra di Libertà, Bosnia and Herzegovina's Intermeco, and Kosovo's Europa. Athletes from these countries stand silent at the medal ceremony, the crowd hums or claps, and there is nothing for citizens to forget the words to. The reasons for the silence differ in each case. The Marcha Real is the oldest and most contested; the two Balkan anthems are products of post-war political compromises; and San Marino's anthem only acquired its current title "Terra di Libertà" in September 2025. Lyrics have been written for three of the four at various points; none stuck.

Spain: Marcha Real (1761)

Spain's "Marcha Real" ("Royal March"), sometimes also called the "Marcha Granadera" ("Grenadier March"), is the oldest of the four wordless anthems and one of the oldest national anthems of any kind still in use. The sheet music first appears in the 1761 Libro de la Ordenanza de los Toques Militares de la Infantería Española, which is part of the reason no clear composer has ever been confirmed; Manuel de Espinosa de los Monteros is the most commonly cited author, but the work appeared in the military manual without an attribution. A persistent 19th-century rumor held that Frederick the Great of Prussia had composed it, but that claim is now generally treated as a fiction. King Charles III formally designated it the Spanish Honor March on October 3, 1770, and during the reign of Queen Isabella II (1833 to 1868) it became the de facto national anthem.

The Marcha Real has carried lyrics twice. Eduardo Marquina wrote a set during the reign of Alfonso XIII (1902 to 1931), and José María Pemán wrote a different version in 1928 that was later associated with the Franco regime (1939 to 1975). Neither was ever formally adopted as the anthem's text. The current version of the music dates to Royal Decree 1560/1997, signed October 10, 1997, which set the anthem in B-flat major at a tempo of 76 beats per minute and a total length of 52 seconds. Francisco Grau's 1997 arrangement replaced the earlier 1908 harmonization by Bartolomé Pérez Casas; the Spanish government paid the Pérez Casas estate 130 million pesetas (roughly €782,000 at the 1997 exchange rate) for the underlying rights.

The most recent attempt to add words came from the Spanish Olympic Committee (COE) in the winter of 2007 to 2008. After reviewing roughly 7,000 public submissions, a jury chose lyrics by Paulino Cubero, a 52-year-old unemployed engineer; the first verse read "¡Viva España! Cantemos todos juntos, con distinta voz y un solo corazón" ("Long live Spain! Let us sing all together, with different voices and a single heart"). Plácido Domingo was scheduled to debut the lyrics at an Olympic Committee gala on January 21, 2008. The proposal was leaked to the press on January 11, ran into immediate political resistance from Catalan and Basque nationalists who objected to the framing, and was withdrawn five days later by COE chairman Alejandro Blanco on the grounds that the entry "had to unite people and there had to be consensus." Cubero, on returning to the unemployment office shortly after, said: "These are the miseries of our country." No further attempt has been made.

San Marino: Terra di Libertà (1894, retitled 2025)

The Republic of San Marino, founded by tradition in 301 CE and the oldest continuous sovereign state in Europe by most accounts, adopted its current anthem in 1894. The music was written by Italian violinist and composer Federico Consolo and is based on a tenth-century chorale; it replaced two earlier de facto anthems, "La Sammarinese" and the "Hymn of San Marino." Until September 26, 2025, the composition had no formal title and was simply called "Inno Nazionale della Repubblica" ("National Anthem of the Republic"). On that date, the Sammarinese government formally titled it "Terra di Libertà" ("Land of Liberty"), the opening words of an unofficial set of lyrics that had been written for it by Italian poet and 1906 Nobel laureate Giosuè Carducci.

The Carducci lyrics are taught in some Sammarinese schools and have been performed in informal settings, but they have never been used at official state ceremonies. At national-team soccer matches, at the Captains Regent's investiture (San Marino's heads of state, two of them, rotating every six months), and at any other formal occasion calling for the anthem, the wordless instrumental version is the one performed. The 2025 retitling did not change that; it was a naming exercise rather than a textual adoption, and the anthem remains, in practical effect, the instrumental piece that visitors have heard at Sammarinese events for over a century.

Bosnia And Herzegovina: Intermeco (1998)

Bosnia and Herzegovina's current national anthem was composed in 1998 by Dušan Šestić, a Bosnian Serb composer from Banja Luka, and adopted on June 25, 1999 by the Office of the UN High Representative (the de facto authority overseeing the country's post-Dayton political settlement). It was formally adopted by the Bosnian state in 2001. Its working title "Intermeco" (an Italianized version of "intermezzo") is commonly used as the anthem's name in public, but it has never been officially declared as such; the formal designation is simply "Državna himna Bosne i Hercegovine" ("National Anthem of Bosnia and Herzegovina"). It replaced the previous anthem "Jedna si jedina" ("You Are the One and Only"), which the country's Serb and Croat communities had largely refused to accept because of its Bosniak identification.

Šestić himself was attacked from multiple sides for the commission: some Bosnian Serbs disliked that he had written the anthem of a state whose existence they opposed, while some Bosniaks and Croats disliked that a Serb had written their anthem. In February 2009, a parliamentary commission accepted draft lyrics co-written by Šestić and Benjamin Isović, with a closing line of "We're going into the future together." The state parliament never approved them. The objection that proved fatal to the draft was that the proposed text mentioned neither of the country's two constitutional entities (the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska) nor its three constituent peoples (Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats); each side complained for opposite reasons. A second attempt led by Bosniak MP Šemsudin Mehmedović in 2016 to 2018 produced no result. The anthem remains officially without lyrics as of 2026.

Kosovo: Europa (2008)

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on February 17, 2008. At the declaration ceremony, the European Anthem (Beethoven's "Ode to Joy") was played as a deliberate gesture to the European Union, whose support had been instrumental in the path to independence. Four months later, on June 11, 2008, the Kosovo Assembly adopted a national anthem of its own, composed by Mendi Mengjiqi and titled "Europa" (sometimes "Europe"). The composition was selected through a public competition, and the deliberate absence of lyrics was a political choice rather than an accident of history: Kosovo's population is roughly 92 percent Albanian-speaking and 4 percent Serbian-speaking, with smaller Bosniak, Turkish, Romani, and Gorani communities, and any text would have privileged one language group over the others.

Before 2008, the Albanian national anthem "Himni i Flamurit" ("Hymn to the Flag") had been widely used in Kosovo informally and continues to be sung at sporting and civil events by ethnic Albanian Kosovars. Kosovo is recognized by approximately 100 of the 193 UN member states as of 2026 (notably not by Serbia, Russia, China, India, or Brazil) and is not a UN member; it is, however, a member of the IMF, the World Bank, and FIFA, and its anthem is played at the relevant international competitions in those organizations.

Common Threads

Three of the four wordless anthems are the way they are for the same broad reason: the country contains overlapping ethnic or linguistic groups whose claims to a common text cannot easily be reconciled. Spain has Castilian, Catalan, Basque, and Galician identities to navigate, and the Cubero lyrics of 2008 foundered on precisely that. Bosnia and Herzegovina has the Bosniak-Serb-Croat tripartite division built into its constitution; the 2009 draft lyrics failed because they could not satisfy any of the three at once. Kosovo's wordlessness was a preemptive solution to the same problem on a different scale. San Marino sits in a category of one: a small, ethnically homogeneous republic whose anthem evolved from a tenth-century chorale and whose unofficial Carducci lyrics simply never moved out of the schoolbook stage in over a century of trying. The European Anthem itself (the EU's official instrumental "Ode to Joy") is wordless for related reasons: Friedrich Schiller's German text would have privileged one of the bloc's 24 official languages. The standard audience response in all five cases (the four national anthems above plus the EU anthem) is the same: humming, clapping in time, or respectful silence.