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Croatia has 56,542 square kilometers (plus its sea area - 31,900 sq.km.) 1,777 km of coastline (and more than 4,000 km of islands coastline), 4,437,000 inhabitants (just as a quarter of New York), and almost as many abroad, counting through last three generations. Among altogether 47 European countries Croatia is
- 26th with respect to its population, and also
- 26th with respect to its area.
Among 47 European countries we also include Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Russia, but with respective population and area only in Europe, as done in the literature.
It had the greatest emigration rate in the world, after Ireland.
It is organized as parliamentary, multiparty Republic.
The language we speak is Croatian, and the official script we use today is Latin. Besides the Latin Script, another two national Scripts were used extensively during many centuries: Croatian Glagolitic and Croatian Cyrillic.
The name of the Croatian monetary unit is KUNA (KN), which has 100 lipas. The meaning of KUNA is - a marten - its skin had been used as a unit in trade. The earliest mention we know of is from the year 1018, on the island of Cres. The first known use of kuna on a Croatian coin goes as far back as 1256, when a local currency displaying kuna was issued in Slavonia.
The ethnic structure of Croatia is as follows:
- Croats 87.98%
- minorities 7.74%
- other nations 2.64%.
Religions:
- Catholic 87.98%
- Orthodox 4.42%
- Muslim 1.28%
- Atheist 5.21
This coat of arms was affirmed by 15th century documents. It is a very old symbol of Croatia resembling a red-white chess table. Now it also has a crown composed of five regional symbols representing:
- the oldest known Croatian coat of arms,
- Dubrovnik,
- Dalmatia,
- Istria
- Slavonia.
National parks in Croatia:
- the Plitvice lakes
- the Kornati islands (George Bernard Shaw once visited Kornati, and wrote the following "On the last day of the Creation God desired to crown his work, and thus created the Kornati Islands out of tears, stars and breath")
- the Brijuni islands
- the island of Mljet
- the Krka river and its waterfalls
- the Velebit mountain, it has two and a half times more plant species than the entire Great Britain
- the Risnjak mountain
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