Southern Asia
Flag of Iran
Ancient empire wearing a modern face.
Colours, by share of the flag
- #d80000 28%
- #189030 28%
- #f0f0f0 27%
Measured from the flag artwork itself, so shares are approximate and emblems get folded into the nearest tone.
Flags people confuse it with
Iran in numbers
| Official name | Islamic Republic of Iran |
|---|---|
| Capital | Tehran |
| Region | Southern Asia, Asia |
| Population | 83,992,953 |
| Area | 1,648,195 km² · 51 people per km² |
| Currency | Iranian rial (IRR) |
| Languages | Persian |
| Country codes | IR · IRN · .ir |
| Coastline | Has a coast |
Things worth knowing
- Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire begun by Darius the Great, still stands in stone columns and carved reliefs more than two thousand years after Alexander burned it.
- Two great deserts, the Dasht-e Kavir and the Dasht-e Lut, dominate the interior, and satellites have clocked the Lut among the hottest land surfaces ever measured on Earth.
- Persian, written in a Perso-Arabic script but an Indo-European language unrelated to Arabic, carries a poetic tradition so beloved that ordinary families keep volumes of Hafez and Rumi at home.
Did you know
Iranians invented the qanat, an underground tunnel that channels mountain groundwater across the desert by gravity alone, and some have been delivering water continuously for thousands of years.
Neighbours
Can you name it without the caption?
Play the free flags quiz in your browser, or get GeoSpark on Android for all 196 countries with capitals, maps and spaced review.
Country data from the mledoze/countries dataset under ODbL 1.0. Flag artwork from the same dataset. All 196 flags.