Czechia 🇨🇿

Czechia is an independent state in Central Europe, and a member of the United Nations. The long form of the name is Czech Republic. Prague is the capital.

By land area it covers 78,865 km², which ranks it 118th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind French Guiana and just ahead of Panama. For scale, it is a fraction smaller than Austria.

Around 10.9 million people live there, placing it 87th of 249 by population — between Cuba above it and Honduras below. Within Central Europe alone it is the 4th largest of 6 and the 2nd most populous.

Czechia has no coastline of its own, so every ship-borne import and export crosses somebody else's border first. The good news is that the sea is only one frontier away: Germany and Poland have coastline, which makes them the obvious routes for freight heading to a port.

That geography has practical consequences. Landlocked countries carry higher freight costs than coastal ones because goods change hands, transport mode and jurisdiction more often, and because a neighbour's road, rail or customs problem becomes Czechia's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in Czechia's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Of the countries on Czechia's borders, Austria and Slovakia are landlocked as well, so a route in that direction only moves the problem along. The remaining borders are the ones that lead, eventually, to salt water.

Coastal countries on the border:

• 🇩🇪 Germany
• 🇵🇱 Poland

Its reference point sits at 49.8° north and 15.5° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 5,538 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Kazakhstan.

Its land neighbours number 4: Austria, Germany, Poland and Slovakia. The largest of them by area is Germany, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 134.7 million people.

It has no sea coast of its own. That is true of 45 of the 249 entries here, which reliably raises the cost of trade, because port access depends on a transit agreement with a neighbour. 2 of its neighbours, Austria and Slovakia, are landlocked too. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Density comes out at around 138 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. The median across all 249 entries here is about 91 per square kilometre.

The demonym is Czech, so residents are Czech.

Officially it is multilingual, listing Czech and Slovak. Czech is listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes it effectively unique to Czechia.

Inside Europe it places 12th of 53 by population, and it accounts for 15% of everyone living in Central Europe.

Zoom in from the world to Central Europe and Czechia sits 2nd of 6 by population and 4th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Poland just above and Hungary just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇵🇱 Poland
• 🇭🇺 Hungary
• 🇵🇱 Poland

It uses the Czech koruna (Kč, CZK). It is issued for Czechia alone.

The top-level domain is .cz. To phone it from abroad you dial +420. In ISO terms it is cz in two letters and CZE in three.

Prague is the city to remember for this country.

Czechia is one of the 192 UN member states in this dataset. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.

The Czech koruna (CZK) is used only in Czechia 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. Slovak is listed for 2 entries here, Czechia 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.