🇽🇰 Kosovo

Where is Kosovo?

Kosovo lies in Southeast Europe, on the continent of Europe.

It sits in the northern half of the world, roughly 4 750 km from the equator.

Kosovo is landlocked: it has no coast at all, so you cannot reach the sea without crossing another country.

It shares a border with 4 countries: Albania, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.

How big is Kosovo?

Kosovo covers 10 908 square kilometres.

That is about 4.2 times the size of Luxembourg.

Who lives in Kosovo?

People here speak Albanian and Serbian.

They pay with the Euro (€).

The land of Kosovo

Because it is landlocked, everything that arrives by ship has to cross one of its 4 neighbours first.

It lies between the tropics and the poles, which is the single biggest reason its weather is the way it is.

What makes Kosovo different?

Websites from here often end in .xk.

Kosovo and the rest of the world

It takes up about 0.01 % of all the land that countries stand on.

Kosovo and its neighbours

Serbia, its largest neighbour, is about 8.1 times bigger.

A country, or a territory?

Kosovo is not an independent country but a territory. It has its own name, its own borders and often its own laws, but another country speaks for it abroad — it holds no seat of its own at the United Nations, for instance.

That is more common than it sounds. There are dozens of such places around the world: some sit far from the country they belong to, some right beside it. A few govern themselves almost completely and hand over only defence and foreign policy; others are held more closely. How much a territory decides for itself is settled case by case, never by one rule.

On this site territories get a page of their own, because children look them up and because other pages link to them. They are left out of the record lists, though: those rank only members of the United Nations, so that a ranking never mixes countries with places belonging to somebody else.

Its nearest neighbour by land is Albania.