Hey there! Thanks for the ask! Oh, this is an interesting one.

Okay, I may sound super boring with my "Markovia is basically Belgian Luxembourg" routine, but... If we follow that logic, the answer would probably be around 40–50 municipalities. Why? Because the Belgian Province of Luxembourg is divided into 44 municipalities (called communes locally). It's also worth noting that Belgium doesn't make a legal distinction between towns and cities, unlike many other European countries.

This blog is slowly turning into "Discover Belgium with 21Anon12!" 😅

That said, if we look at Batman and the Outsiders, Markovia isn't portrayed as a country with lots of famous cities. As far as I can remember, the only one that's consistently named is Markovburg, the capital.

Now... I have this vague memory of one or two other towns being mentioned somewhere, but I can't find them right now, so that may very well be my brain making things up. (Sorry! I'm still on vacation and don't have access to my everything-Markovia-panels folder)

In the Arrowverse, we also learn that Markovia has a population of a little over one million people. So we're definitely not talking about a country with several huge metropolitan areas.

My personal headcanon is that the country is organized around small municipalities/communes, with Markovburg being the only real large city.

Oh, this is a fun combination of questions. I'm a bit nervous to answer, because I can't remember anything in the comics themselves touching on this. @21anon12 is more knowledgeable about Outsiders lore than I am, so she might be a better person to ask.

Based on the people's history and geography, a few options for traditional sports reveal themselves. We don't know much about recreation among the Polabian slavs, but we know that they practiced sledding and skiing, and given its location Markovia has stolen all of Belgium's best ski slopes. So there's an option for a national sport. Since popular games usually derive from peasant culture, Wallonia's local Balle Pelote is another one that you might see people play more often. And, if the games of their closest linguistic relatives are historic enough, some variation on the Spreewald's "man on horseback attacks a chicken" games might survive after the migration.

Hey there! Thanks for the ask ✨

Personally, I like the very first depiction of Markovia in the comics, from Batman and the Outsiders #1:

"Hello, Mr. Barr? Yes, that's quite literally WESTERN Europe."

And what is that location in the real world?

Basically the Belgian province of Luxembourg (with a tiny bit of Namur).

Which also explains this stupid tag I always put on my Markovia fics:

So... my headcanon is essentially the original canon. 😅 Maybe a bit boring, sorry.

In my fics, whenever the comics don't give us an answer, I tend to borrow from Belgium (for example, the legal drinking age) and from Young Justice for the language, so everyone speaks Latvian.

Basically, as always, I stitch together the messiest patchwork imaginable to reconcile different continuities. 😂

But I do have one very personal Markovia headcanon:

The crown.

In the comics, Markovia's crown is basically the classic heraldic coronet (gold, red velvet, ermine… you know the one).

Meanwhile, in Young Justice we get… whatever this is.

That's the single most heinous crime committed in that continuity. (Yes, counting Baron Bedlam's gruesome death.)

Personally, I don't really like either design, so my headcanon is loosely inspired by the Iron Crown.

Come on. Markovia's flag is yellow and green. This crown is yellow and green. The vibes are immaculate.

Am I dumb guys. Have we been knowing this???

Markovia mentioned in Superman 2025??? Guys she’s gonna be in the dcu omg.

I want Markovic's spelling system to be at least somewhat cohesive, and not totally dependent on a given word's etymology. I cannot do this while working with Polanski's base, namely because it uses the letter ‹c› for /t͡s/. ‹ck› /k/ does exist in the Markovian given name Frederick, and I don't like having that in a language where a /t͡sk/ cluster is phonotactically on the table. At the same time, German, whose orthography I initially looked to for phonemes not in Polabian, doesn't seem to be too dominant either. Unlike Polish, you don't see any "Markowa" or "Dementiewa" in the comics. The distinctive features of German orthography are limited to words loaned from German recently. If only the area had a spelling system which allowed ‹ck› for /k/ but didn't use ‹w› for /v/...

So I'm basing it on Middle Dutch. I'm not going to publish a definitive orthography for Modern Markovic until I have at least one thousand words, since that is supposed to be descriptive rather than a set of rules. I want the language to be naturalistic, and that requires some irregularity. Old Markovic doesn't have that problem though. Like most people in this time period, the majority of Markovic speakers in the early modern era were illiterate, and among the men of letters spellings varied from place to place, person to person, and day to day. And, like many languages of the period, Markovic's first standard spelling system came about during the reformation, when the Bible was translated into the vernacular. In my lore (#mylore) I have a translation published by Dutch missionaries in the late 16th Century, based on the Liesvelt Bible. This introduces all kinds of Batavicisms into the language's writing. (Given its geography, I imagine that Markovia was plurality Reformed at the height of the Reformation, but is majority Catholic in the modern day).