Athens Trivia
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106 free Athens trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Athens has 3,400 years of recorded history and this quiz uses most of them. It begins with the myth of Athena's olive tree and Poseidon's spring, moves through Cleisthenes' democracy, Marathon and Salamis, Pericles' building programme, ostracism and the Peloponnesian War, and then follows the city into obscurity: Justinian closing the philosophy schools in 529, the Frankish dukes, Mehmed II riding in in 1458, the Venetian shell that blew up the Parthenon in 1687, and Lord Elgin's crates. The modern city gets equal time: King Otto's Bavarian planners and a capital of 4,000 people, the 1896 Games in the marble Panathenaic Stadium, the 1922 refugees who brought rebetiko, the smog years, the 2004 Olympics and the metro that doubles as an archaeological museum. Landmarks include the Acropolis and its museum, the Erechtheion's Caryatids, Hadrian's Temple of Olympian Zeus, Lycabettus, Syntagma and the Evzones, Plaka and Anafiotika, Piraeus and the football derby of the eternal enemies. There is also Europe's record temperature and the world's biggest count of theatre stages. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Athens and its monuments, events and institutions, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Our Ancient Greece and Greece quizzes go wider.
30 of 106 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the founding myth, Athena won patronage of the city by giving Athenians what?
The first domesticated olive tree
The first domesticated olive tree was Athena's offering against Poseidon's gift, a salt spring in most tellings; the versions differ on who judged, but she always wins the city, and the olive gave Athenians oil, food and wood.
Q 02How do modern scholars think Athens and Athena got their matching names?
The deity was named after the place
Most scholars hold that the deity was named after the place: the ending -ene is common in Greek place names but rare in personal names, and the root is probably pre-Greek.
Q 03Early Athenians wore golden hairpins shaped like which insect, said to show they were sprung from the soil itself?
Cicada
Cicada pins held up the hair of rich old Athenians until shortly before Thucydides wrote, and the fashion spread to their Ionian kin; the insect's young crawl out of the ground, like the earth-born first Athenians.
Q 04Who introduced democracy to Athens in 508 BC?
Cleisthenes
Cleisthenes broke the hold of the old clans by sorting citizens into ten new tribes based on where they lived, not on family ties; Solon's reforms had opened the way decades earlier.
Q 05Which Athenian general led the victory over the Persians at Marathon in 490 BC?
Miltiades
Miltiades talked the war-archon Callimachus into casting the deciding vote for battle when the ten generals split evenly; Themistocles' naval win at Salamis came ten years later.
Q 06Which Athenian statesman launched the public works that produced the Parthenon?
Pericles
Pericles, Athens' leading statesman for some three decades, spent the Delian League's funds, paid in by allies for defence against Persia, on rebuilding the Acropolis.
Q 07What was ostracism in Athenian democracy?
Exiling citizens seen as threats to the state
Ostracism meant exiling citizens seen as threats to the state for ten years: voters scratched a name on a clay shard, an ostrakon, and the man with the most votes left but kept his property.
Q 08Which sculptor oversaw the Parthenon's decoration and made the gold-and-ivory statue of Athena that stood inside?
Phidias
Phidias directed the temple's sculptors and made the towering Athena himself; enemies of his political patron later accused him of stealing gold meant for the statue.
Q 09What does the name of Athens' Acropolis literally mean in Greek?
High city
High city is the sense of akron, 'top', plus polis: many Greek towns had one as a refuge, and the rock in Athens was a Mycenaean king's fortress centuries before it became a sanctuary.
Q 10What is the monumental gateway at the western end of the Acropolis called?
The Propylaea
The Propylaea, designed by Mnesicles, was begun in 437 BC and never finished: work stopped as the Peloponnesian War broke out and was not taken up again.
Q 11What name is given to the sculpted female figures that serve as columns on the Erechtheion's porch?
Caryatids
Caryatids are columns carved as draped women; the six on the building today are copies, since Lord Elgin's agents carried one original off and the other five now stand in the Acropolis Museum.
Q 12During the Venetian siege of 1687, what was the Parthenon being used as?
An Ottoman munitions store
An Ottoman munitions store filled the Parthenon, by then a mosque, when Morosini's Venetians shelled the Acropolis; a mortar shell set it off, and the blast took the roof and most of the walls.
Q 13Which Romantic poet condemned Elgin's removal of the Parthenon sculptures in his poem 'The Curse of Minerva'?
Q 21Which Greek won the marathon at the 1896 Olympics, to the delight of the home crowd?
Spyridon Louis
Spyridon Louis, a water-carrier from Marousi, entered the stadium first and ran his last lap flanked by two Greek princes; fellow Greek Charilaos Vasilakos came in second.
Q 22The marathon race takes its name from the legend of which Greek messenger?
Pheidippides
Pheidippides is the name the satirist Lucian, some six centuries later, gives the runner who died announcing the victory; Herodotus has him run the other way, to Sparta, to seek help before the battle.
Q 23Athens and its port of Piraeus lie on the shore of which gulf?
The Saronic Gulf
Lord Byron
Lord Byron wrote the satire in Athens in 1811, casting Elgin as a plunderer; Elgin's agents had removed about half the surviving sculptures, which Parliament bought from him in 1816.
Q 14Which Roman emperor finally completed Athens' Temple of Olympian Zeus, begun more than six centuries earlier?
Hadrian
Hadrian dedicated the Temple of Olympian Zeus around AD 131; the tyrants who began it in the 6th century BC were driven out with little more than the base laid, and the project sat abandoned for generations.
Q 15Which emperor's 529 ban on pagan philosophy teaching is usually taken as the end of ancient Athens?
Justinian I
Justinian I's edict of 529 banned pagans from teaching, closing the Neoplatonic Academy in Athens; the city had remained a philosophical centre that had taught the future emperor Julian.
Q 16Which sultan captured Athens in 1458 and ordered its ancient monuments protected?
Mehmed II
Mehmed II, conqueror of Constantinople five years earlier, is said to have been struck by the beauty of Athens' antiquities; the Parthenon, a church for centuries, was later converted into a mosque.
Q 17Athens replaced which city as capital of independent Greece in 1834?
Nafplio
Nafplio, a fortified port in the Peloponnese, was the seat of the new Greek kingdom until 1834, when the government moved to Athens, chosen for its classical past though war had left it a small town.
Q 18Greece's first king, who commissioned a modern city plan for Athens, came from which country?
Bavaria
Bavaria sent its king's 17-year-old son Otto to be Greece's first monarch, with Bavarian regents governing for him at first; Greeks deposed him in 1862 and took a Danish prince as George I.
Q 19The Panathenaic Stadium is the only stadium in the world built entirely of what?
Marble
Marble throughout earned the stadium its nickname Kallimarmaro, 'beautiful marble'; abandoned and buried for centuries, it was dug out by archaeologists and rebuilt for the 1896 Olympics with money from Georgios Averoff.
Q 20Winners at the 1896 Athens Olympics were not given gold, so their first-place medal was made of which metal?
Silver
Silver went to each winner in 1896 and copper to the runner-up; the gold-silver-bronze order dates from St. Louis in 1904, and the IOC later relabelled the 1896 results to match.
The Saronic Gulf, an arm of the Aegean, holds the island of Salamis, in whose narrow straits the outnumbered Greek fleet beat the Persian navy in 480 BC.
Q 24Which architect crowned the Athens Olympic Stadium with twin steel arches and a suspended roof for the 2004 Games?
Santiago Calatrava
Santiago Calatrava's two steel arches span 304 m and carry a roof of 5,000 polycarbonate panels; built to one side and slid into place, it was finished just in time for the 2004 Games.
Q 25Which song style, spread through Athens by the 1922 refugees from Asia Minor, became the basis of Greek popular music?
Rebetiko
Rebetiko, the music of port taverns and the cafés of Smyrna, took root in the poor districts where the refugees settled; songwriters such as Vassilis Tsitsanis later smoothed it into the laiko pop that followed.
Q 26What are the kilted Greek presidential guards outside Parliament at Syntagma called?
Evzones
Evzones of the Presidential Guard wear the pleated fustanella kilt and pom-pommed tsarouchia shoes, a uniform recalling the mountain fighters of the War of Independence; they change guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Q 27Which hill is the highest point in central Athens at 277 m?
Lycabettus
Lycabettus rises to 277 m; myth says Athena dropped the rock there while carrying it to fortify the Acropolis, and a funicular climbs to the chapel of St George on its summit.
Q 28Which mountain on the edge of Athens was quarried for the white stone of the Parthenon?
Mount Pentelicus
Mount Pentelicus, northeast of the city, supplied the temple's fine white stone; traces of iron in it have oxidised over the centuries, giving the Parthenon its soft honey colour.
Q 29Plaka, below the Acropolis, is described as what?
The oldest district of Athens
Plaka is the oldest district of Athens, built over the houses of the ancient city; on its upper edge, Anafiotika was built like a Cycladic island village by 19th-century settlers from Anafi.
Q 30Stavros Niarchos, whose foundation paid for Athens' Renzo Piano-designed cultural center, made his fortune in which industry?
Shipping
Shipping made Stavros Niarchos one of Greece's great tycoons; the foundation he left funded the cultural center, home to the national library and opera, and gave it to the Greek state in 2017.