This paper presents a new database for financial crises in European countries, which serves as an important step towards establishing a common ground for macroprudential oversight and policymaking in the EU. The database focuses on providing precise chronological definitions of crisis periods to support the calibration of models in macroprudential analysis. An important contribution of this work is the identification of financial crises by combining a quantitative approach based on a financial stress index with expert judgement from national and European authorities. Key innovations of this database are (i) the inclusion of qualitative information about events and policy responses, (ii) the introduction of a broad set of non-exclusive categories to classify events, and (iii) a distinction between event and post-event adjustment periods. […]