conventional long form: Republic of Croatia
conventional short form: Croatia
local long form: Republika Hrvatska
local short form: Hrvatska
former: People's Republic of Croatia, Socialist Republic of Croatia
56,542 km²
Zagreb
kuna (HRK)
385
.hr
Croatian, Serbian, undesignated, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, German)
Roman Catholic, Orthodox, other Christian, Muslim
4,493,312
presidential/parliamentary democracy
three equal horizontal bands of red (top), white, and blue superimposed by the Croatian coat of arms (red and white checkered)
The lands that today comprise Croatia were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the close of World War I. In 1918, the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes formed a kingdom known after 1929 as Yugoslavia. Following World War II, Yugoslavia became a federal independent Communist state under the strong hand of Marshal TITO. Although Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, it took four years of sporadic, but often bitter, fighting before occupying Serb armies were mostly cleared from Croatian lands. Under UN supervision, the last Serb-held enclave in eastern Slavonia was returned to Croatia in 1998.
Mediterranean and continental; continental climate predominant with hot summers and cold winters; mild winters, dry summers along coast
