Moldova 🇲🇩

Filed under Europe and more precisely Eastern Europe, Moldova is a sovereign state. Treaties and official documents call it Republic of Moldova. Its seat of government is Chișinău.

It covers 33,846 km², which ranks it 140th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Guinea-Bissau and just ahead of Belgium. For scale, it is a little larger than Belgium.

It is home to roughly 2.4 million people, placing it 144th of 249 by population — between Botswana above it and Albania below. Within Eastern Europe alone it is the 4th largest of 4 and the 4th most populous.

Moldova 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: Ukraine and Romania 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 Moldova's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in Moldova's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Coastal countries on the border:

• 🇺🇦 Ukraine
• 🇷🇴 Romania

The coordinates the dataset gives are 47.0° N, 29.0° E, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 5,232 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Saint Pierre and Miquelon sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

2 countries share a land border with it: Romania and Ukraine. The largest of them by area is Ukraine, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 56.9 million people.

This is one of the world's landlocked countries. 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. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Moldova ranks 140th of 249 by area and 144th by population. That works out at 0.023% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.030% 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 Moldova in the size ordering are Guinea-Bissau at 36,125 km² and Belgium at 30,528 km², against Moldova's 33,846 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Moldova averages 71 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 145th 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.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 71 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.

Moldavian is the only official language. No other entry in this dataset lists Moldavian, so on this list it stands alone.

The demonym is Moldovan, so residents are Moldovans.

Against Europe as a whole it is the 30th most populous of 53 entries, and it accounts for 1.2% of everyone living in Eastern Europe.

Within Eastern Europe, Moldova is the least populous of the 4 entries listed here, and 4th by area. Belarus is the next step up. Being the smallest of a group is not the same as being small in absolute terms — the subregional context is what gives the figure meaning.

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

• 🇧🇾 Belarus
• 🇷🇺 Russia

The Moldovan leu (MDL) is used only in Moldova 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.

Moldavian is listed for Moldova and for no other entry on this site. A language confined to one country is unusual, and it is normally a sign of long isolation or of deliberate revival.

The currency is the Moldovan leu (L, MDL). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Moldova.

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

Its internet country code is .md. Calls from overseas start with +373. In ISO terms it is md in two letters and MDA in three.

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.