Slovakia 🇸🇰

Slovakia is a sovereign country in Central Europe, in the wider region of Europe. Its full official name is Slovak Republic. Its seat of government is Bratislava.

The population is about 5.4 million, placing it 119th of 249 by population — between Norway above it and Ireland below. Among the 6 entries in Central Europe it ranks 5th by area and 5th by population.

It covers 49,037 km², which ranks it 131st of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Costa Rica and just ahead of the Dominican Republic. That makes it a little larger than Denmark.

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

Of the countries on Slovakia's borders, Austria, Czechia and Hungary 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:

• 🇺🇦 Ukraine
• 🇵🇱 Poland

Plotted on a globe it falls at 48.7° north, 19.5° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 5,418 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Kazakhstan and Saint Pierre and Miquelon — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

It borders 5 neighbours: Austria, Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Ukraine. The largest of them by area is Ukraine, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 104.1 million people.

This is one of the world's landlocked countries. That is true of 45 of the 249 entries here, and it means every shipment in or out has to cross someone else's border first. 3 of its neighbours, Austria, Czechia and Hungary, are landlocked too. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Density comes out at around 111 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

Officially it is monolingual: Slovak. It shares that with Czechia.

The demonym is Slovak, so residents are Slovaks.

Against Europe as a whole it is the 25th most populous of 53 entries, and it accounts for 7.4% of everyone living in Central Europe.

Zoom in from the world to Central Europe and Slovakia sits 5th of 6 by population and 5th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Austria just above and Slovenia 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.

• 🇦🇹 Austria
• 🇸🇮 Slovenia
• 🇵🇱 Poland

It uses the Euro (€, EUR). Another 37 entries use the same currency — Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and Croatia among them — so exchange rates move for reasons that have nothing to do with Slovakia.

The top-level domain is .sk. Calls from overseas start with +421. In ISO terms it is sk in two letters and SVK in three.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Slovakia, the answer is Bratislava.

Slovakia 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.

Slovakia 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. Slovak is listed for 2 entries here, Slovakia 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.