Türkiye 🇹🇷

Türkiye is a sovereign country in Western Asia, in the wider region of Asia. In formal use it is Republic of Türkiye. Ankara is the capital.

Around 85.5 million people live there, placing it 18th of 250 by population — between Iran above it and Germany below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 2nd of 17 in size and 1st in population.

By land area it covers 783,562 km², which ranks it 38th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Mozambique and just ahead of Chile. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is almost exactly the same size as Mozambique.

Spread across 783,562 km², that works out at about 109 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 90 per square kilometre.

People from Türkiye are called Turkish.

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

Inside Asia it places 10th of 50 by population, and it accounts for 28% of everyone living in Western Asia.

Within Western Asia, Türkiye is the most populous of the 17 entries this site lists, and 2nd by area. Iraq is next in line by population.

Every entry in Western Asia has its own guide here, so if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time, Iraq is the place to carry on.

• 🇮🇶 Iraq
• 🇹🇷 Türkiye

The coordinates the dataset gives are 39.0° N, 35.0° E, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 4,341 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

The United States, Spain and Kyrgyzstan sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

8 countries share a land border with it: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Iran, Iraq and Syria. The largest of them by area is Iran, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 196.1 million people.

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

Put next to every other entry on this site, Türkiye ranks 38th of 250 by area and 18th by population. That works out at 0.52% of the combined land area of all 250 entries and 1.0% 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 Türkiye in the size ordering are Mozambique at 801,590 km² and Chile at 756,102 km², against Türkiye's 783,562 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Türkiye averages 109 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 108th of the 248 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 Turkish lira (TRY) is used only in Türkiye among the 250 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. Turkish is listed for 2 entries here, Türkiye 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.

It uses the Turkish lira (₺, TRY). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Türkiye.

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

The top-level domain is .tr. To phone it from abroad you dial +90. Its ISO codes are tr and TUR, which is what most databases and flag files use.

It holds a seat at the United Nations, one of 193 entries here that do. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 250 rather than the familiar 195.