Greece 🇬🇷

Filed under Europe and more precisely Southern Europe, Greece is a sovereign state. The long form of the name is Hellenic Republic. The capital is Athens.

Its territory runs to 131,990 km², which ranks it 97th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Tajikistan and just ahead of Nicaragua. That makes it a fraction smaller than Nepal.

Some 10.4 million people call it home, placing it 93rd of 249 by population — between Sweden above it and Azerbaijan below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 3rd of 10 in size and 4th in population.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 39.0° north, 22.0° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 4,341 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach the United States, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

It borders 4 neighbours: Albania, Bulgaria, Türkiye and North Macedonia. The largest of them by area is Türkiye, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 96.2 million people.

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

Spread across 131,990 km², that works out at about 79 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

People from Greece are called Greeks.

Officially it is monolingual: Greek. It shares that with Cyprus.

Inside Europe it places 15th of 53 by population, and it accounts for 7.9% of everyone living in Southern Europe.

Greece does not have the Euro to itself. It is one of 38 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is EUR, and the others include listed below. A shared currency usually points at something real — a monetary union, a currency board, a former colonial administration, or a small economy pegging itself to a large neighbour's money — and it means a price quoted in EUR travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. Greek is listed for 2 entries here, Greece 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 Southern Europe and Greece sits 4th of 10 by population and 3rd by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Portugal just above and Cyprus just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇵🇹 Portugal
• 🇨🇾 Cyprus
• 🇮🇹 Italy

Put next to every other entry on this site, Greece ranks 97th of 249 by area and 93rd by population. That works out at 0.088% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.13% 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 Greece in the size ordering are Tajikistan at 143,100 km² and Nicaragua at 130,373 km², against Greece's 131,990 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Greece averages 79 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 134th 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.

Money there is the Euro (€, EUR). That is a shared currency: 37 other entries use it, including Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and Croatia.

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

Websites there use the .gr domain. Calls from overseas start with +30. Its ISO codes are gr and GRC, which is what most databases and flag files use.

As a sovereign state it is among the 192 UN members listed here. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.