The world, in proportion.
Kartavera is an atlas that refuses to lie about size. Every country is drawn at its true area on the Equal Earth projection, with honest numbers beside it, and you can pick any country up and put it anywhere to see how it really compares.
Why it exists
The map most of us grew up with was drawn in 1569 for sailors. Mercator's projection keeps compass bearings straight and pays for it by inflating everything far from the equator: Greenland looks the size of Africa, which is fourteen times larger. Five centuries later that picture is still in classrooms, on news channels and in every navigation app.
Kartavera is a small correction. Equal Earth, published by Šavrič, Patterson and Jenny in 2018, keeps every square kilometre the same size on screen. Move a country anywhere on it and it stays exactly as big as it is.
What you can do here
Slide the map from Mercator to Equal Earth and watch the poles deflate. Pick a country, drag it across the world, compare it with whatever it lands on.
Ten pairs of countries at the same scale, one question: which is larger? The same puzzle for everyone, every day.
A page for every pair of 235 countries: the overlay at true scale, the table, and why your old map disagrees.
Principles
- Honest by construction. Everything drawn is equal-area. Moving a country is a rotation of the sphere, so its area cannot change, not even by accident.
- Numbers you can check. Every figure has a named source and a year. When a source is wrong for our purpose, we say so and pick another.
- Nothing to sign up for. No accounts, no cookies, no trackers, no third-party requests — even the fonts are served from here.
- Free to use. If Kartavera ever needs to earn its keep, it will be by being useful, not by selling what you do here.
Who is behind it
Kartavera is an independent project from Belgrade, Serbia, designed, built and run by one person since September 2026. It started with a simple irritation: every map app still uses a projection made for sixteenth-century ships.
- Operator
- Kartavera, Belgrade, Serbia
- hello@kartavera.com
- Press & partnerships
- Use the form below or write to the address above. Embeds and data exports are coming; ask and we will tell you when.
Data & sources
Dataset built 2026-09-06. Everything below is open data; nothing is scraped from another map site.
| What | Source | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Geometry | Natural Earth, 110m for the world map, 50m for figures | Public domain |
| Names, ISO codes, sovereignty, regions | Natural Earth admin-0 attributes | Public domain |
| Area | Wikidata (conventional land + water totals). Not the World Bank's "surface area", which counts only ice-free land for Greenland | CC0 |
| Population | World Bank, most recent year; Wikidata for territories the Bank omits | CC BY 4.0 / CC0 |
| Capitals | World Bank; Wikidata as fallback | CC BY 4.0 / CC0 |
| Neighbours, coastlines | Derived from the geometry itself | — |
The Equal Earth projection is free to use. Kosovo, Northern Cyprus and Somaliland are drawn as Natural Earth draws them but have no ISO numeric code, so they carry no figures and no pages. Spotted a wrong number? Tell us below.
Privacy
Kartavera keeps no accounts and sets no cookies. The daily game stores your streak in your own browser and nowhere else. Server logs hold IP addresses for up to fourteen days, for abuse protection only. If you write to us we keep your message and address to answer you; ask and they are deleted.