Albania 🇦🇱

Albania is a sovereign country in Southeast Europe, in the wider region of Europe. Treaties and official documents call it Republic of Albania. Its seat of government is Tirana.

The population is about 2.4 million, placing it 145th of 249 by population — between Moldova above it and Lesotho below. Within Southeast Europe alone it is the 6th largest of 9 and the 6th most populous.

It covers 28,748 km², which ranks it 145th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind the Solomon Islands and just ahead of Equatorial Guinea. That makes it a fraction smaller than Belgium.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 41.0° N, 20.0° E, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 4,564 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

4 countries share a land border with it: Montenegro, Greece, North Macedonia and Kosovo. The largest of them by area is Greece, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 14.6 million people.

With both a coast and land borders, it has the trade options a landlocked country does not.

Spread across 28,748 km², that works out at about 83 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 91 per square kilometre.

People from Albania are called Albanians.

Officially it is monolingual: Albanian. It shares that with Kosovo.

Against Europe as a whole it is the 31st most populous of 53 entries, and it accounts for 5.2% of everyone living in Southeast Europe.

The Albanian lek (ALL) is used only in Albania among the 249 entries on this site. Its own currency is one of the clearest markers of an economy that sets its own monetary policy rather than importing somebody else's.

Language reaches wider still. Albanian is listed for 2 entries here, Albania among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.

Zoom in from the world to Southeast Europe and Albania sits 6th of 9 by population and 6th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Bosnia and Herzegovina just above and North Macedonia just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

Romania is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in Southeast Europe has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇧🇦 Bosnia and Herzegovina
• 🇲🇰 North Macedonia
• 🇷🇴 Romania

Put next to every other entry on this site, Albania ranks 145th of 249 by area and 145th by population. That works out at 0.019% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.029% of their combined population. Those denominators matter: this list includes territories and dependencies as well as UN member states, so a rank here is not the same as a rank among sovereign countries.

For a sense of scale, the entries immediately either side of Albania in the size ordering are Solomon Islands at 28,896 km² and Equatorial Guinea at 28,051 km², against Albania's 28,748 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Albania averages 83 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 128th of the 247 entries that have both a population and a measured area. Total area includes inland water, so the true figure for habitable land is higher than this.

It uses the Albanian lek (L, ALL). It is issued for Albania alone.

The top-level domain is .al. Calls from overseas start with +355. Its ISO codes are al and ALB, which is what most databases and flag files use.

Tirana is the seat of government and the answer most quizzes are looking for.

It holds a seat at the United Nations, one of 192 entries here that do. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.