Syria 🇸🇾

Syria is a country in Western Asia, one of the 17 entries this site files under that subregion. Treaties and official documents call it Syrian Arab Republic. Government sits in Damascus.

It covers 185,180 km², which ranks it 89th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Senegal and just ahead of Cambodia. That makes it a fraction smaller than Belarus.

The population is about 24.7 million, placing it 57th of 249 by population — between North Korea above it and Mali below. Within Western Asia alone it is the 6th largest of 17 and the 5th most populous.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 35.0° north, 38.0° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 3,896 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach China, Japan and South Korea — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

It borders 5 neighbours: Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Türkiye. The largest of them by area is Türkiye, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 158.9 million people.

Unlike its landlocked neighbours it reaches the sea directly, while also sharing land frontiers.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 133 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.

Someone from Syria is a Syrian.

Officially it is monolingual: Arabic. Another 24 entries list Arabic too — among them Algeria, Bahrain, Chad and the Comoros.

Against Asia as a whole it is the 22nd most populous of 50 entries, and it accounts for 8.0% of everyone living in Western Asia.

Zoom in from the world to Western Asia and Syria sits 5th of 17 by population and 6th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Saudi Arabia just above and Jordan just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia
• 🇯🇴 Jordan
• 🇹🇷 Türkiye

The Syrian pound (SYP) is used only in Syria 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. Arabic is listed for 25 entries here, Syria 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.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Syria ranks 89th of 249 by area and 57th by population. That works out at 0.12% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.30% 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 Syria in the size ordering are Senegal at 196,722 km² and Cambodia at 181,035 km², against Syria's 185,180 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Syria averages 133 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 94th 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.

The currency is the Syrian pound (£, SYP). That currency appears nowhere else on this list.

Its internet country code is .sy. Calls from overseas start with +963. Standard country codes: sy and SYR.

Damascus 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.