Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Balkans trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Balkans trivia for geography nerds, Interrail veterans and anyone who has argued about where the Balkans actually begin. The quiz opens with the map: the mountains the region is named after, Musala, the seas and rivers that bound the peninsula, the German geographer who invented the idea in 1808 and why modern geographers say it is not a peninsula at all. Then it walks through the history - Vinca proto-writing, Cyril and Methodius, the First Bulgarian Empire, the Ottoman advance and Skanderbeg, independence in the 19th century, the Balkan Wars, Sarajevo in 1914, Yugoslavia and Tito, the Cold War and the wars of the 1990s. The second half covers the region today and its culture: EU and NATO membership, the Prespa Agreement, Kosovo, Bosnia's three-member presidency, Lake Ohrid, Dubrovnik, Mostar's bridge, the Bay of Kotor, Plitvice, Rila and Meteora, plus ajvar, rakia and famous sons and daughters from Mother Teresa and Tesla to Djokovic. Countries get their own pages too - see our Greece, Croatia and Bulgaria trivia. About a third of the questions are easy and the rest step up to genuinely hard. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What do Bulgarians call the mountain range that gives the Balkans its name?
Stara Planina
The range runs about 560 km across Bulgaria from the Serbian border to Cape Emine on the Black Sea; its highest point is Botev Peak.
Q 02What is the highest point in the Balkans, at 2,925 metres?
Musala
Its name comes via Ottoman Turkish from the Arabic for 'near God' or 'place for prayer'; it is the sixth most prominent peak in mainland Europe.
Q 03Which German geographer coined the concept of the 'Balkan Peninsula' in 1808?
August Zeune
Carl Ritter and other geographers objected, arguing only the land south of the mountains could count as a peninsula.
Q 04What does the word 'balkan' mean in Ottoman and modern Turkish?
Chain of wooded mountains
The earliest known use of the name for the range appears on an early 14th-century Arab map.
Q 05By what ancient Thracian name were the Balkan Mountains known from antiquity through the Middle Ages?
Haemus
In Greek myth the Thracian king Haemus was turned into a mountain by Zeus; another version says Typhon's blood (haima) fell there.
Q 06Which rivers are most often given as the northern boundary of the Balkan Peninsula?
The Danube, Sava and Kupa
That is why only the part of Croatia south of the Sava and Kupa, and Serbia south of the Danube, fall inside strict definitions.
Q 07Which sea borders the Balkan Peninsula to the southwest?
The Ionian
The Adriatic lies to the northwest, the Aegean to the south, the Turkish Straits to the east and the Black Sea to the northeast.
Q 08What is the approximate area of the Balkan Peninsula?
470,000 square kilometres
That is a little larger than Sweden; modern geographers dispute whether it is technically a peninsula at all.
Q 09What alternative name for the region has gained ground since the 1990s as 'Balkans' turned negative?
Southeast Europe
An EU initiative of 1999 was called the Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe, and the Balkan Times renamed itself in 2003.
Q 10In the 19th century, 'Balkan Peninsula' was a synonym for which Ottoman term for its European lands?
Rumelia
After the 1878 Congress of Berlin the term was revived for political reasons.
Q 11What neologism covers the ex-Yugoslav states except Slovenia, plus their non-Slavic southern neighbour?
The Western Balkans
The EU uses it for the Balkan countries not yet members; Croatia, counted among them, joined the EU in July 2013.
Q 12What word for a region's fragmentation into small hostile states was coined around the Balkan Wars and World War I?
Balkanization
It is pejorative, and geopoliticians cite the peninsula as a classic 'shatter belt'.
Q 13Which Neolithic Balkan civilisation developed a form of proto-writing before the Sumerians and Minoans?
Vinca culture
Q 21Which Bosnian Serb student assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the Bosnian capital on 28 June 1914?
Gavrilo Princip
He was a member of Young Bosnia; a friend had shown him a newspaper cutting announcing the archduke's visit.
Q 22What was the state created in 1918 that would later be renamed Yugoslavia originally called?
The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes
Serbian geographers such as Jovan Cvijic had promoted the 'Balkans' concept to underpin a state of all South Slavs.
Q 23Which four countries signed the Balkan Pact in Athens in February 1934?
The Balkans were the route by which farming spread from the Middle East into Europe in the 7th millennium BC.
Q 14Which two Byzantine missionary brothers spread Christianity to the pagan Balkans in the 9th century?
Cyril and Methodius
Their disciples went on to develop the Cyrillic alphabet at the Preslav Literary School.
Q 15The Early Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the 9th century in which medieval state?
The First Bulgarian Empire
It was created at Preslav under Tsar Simeon I, probably by disciples of the two brothers who had earlier devised the Glagolitic script.
Q 16Which city, conquered by the Ottomans in 1362, became their capital before Constantinople?
Adrianople (Edirne)
The Serbian Empire was disintegrating at the time and was absorbed after a famous 1389 battle.
Q 17Which leader fought the Ottomans from 1443 to 1468, taking Kruje and leading the League of Lezhe?
Skanderbeg
He had deserted the Ottoman army at the Battle of Nish; his victories at Albulena and the first siege of Kruje made him famous across Europe.
Q 18Which Balkan nation-state was the first to win independence from the Ottoman Empire, in 1821?
Greece
Five more Balkan states followed between 1878 and 1912.
Q 19Which four states allied against the Ottoman Empire in the First Balkan War of 1912-13?
Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro
It stripped the Ottomans of nearly all their remaining European territory.
Q 20The Second Balkan War began in 1913 when Bulgaria attacked its former allies over which region?
Macedonia
It ended up fighting all four other combatants of the first war and lost territory on every front.
Greece, Romania, Turkey and Yugoslavia
The Danube touches ten countries; the island of Ada Kaleh was drowned when the gorge's dam was built in 1970.
Q 24Which Axis power invaded Yugoslavia and its southern neighbour in April 1941, with a Balkan ally?
Germany
Italy had invaded from its protectorate in 1940 and been thrown back; the two conquered countries were partitioned between Germany, Italy and Bulgaria.
Q 25Which conflict of 1944-49 prompted the Truman Doctrine and became the first battleground of the Cold War?
The Greek Civil War
Communist volunteers from neighbouring communist states backed the insurgents.
Q 26Which grouping did Tito's Yugoslavia help found with India and Egypt after breaking with the Soviet Union?
The Non-Aligned Movement
Yugoslavia broke with Moscow in 1948 and courted the West instead.
Q 27Which Balkan country declared itself the world's first constitutionally atheist state in 1976?
Albania
Under Enver Hoxha the country also broke with Moscow and drifted toward China before turning isolationist.
Q 28How many republics made up socialist Yugoslavia under its 1946 constitution?
Six
Serbia also contained two autonomous units which had much of the status of republics but could not secede.
Q 29Which capital endured modern history's longest siege of a capital, 1,425 days from 1992?
Sarajevo
Only eight years earlier the same city had hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics.
Q 30Which former Yugoslav republic was the first to join the European Union, in 2004?
Slovenia
It joined in the 2004 enlargement; three more Balkan countries followed between 2007 and 2013.