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50 free Black Sea trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Black Sea is a near-landlocked sea whose deep water has been dead for thousands of years, and this quiz covers it from the geology up. It starts with the map: the six countries on its shore, the 24 in its drainage basin, the Danube, Dnieper and Dniester, the Bosporus and Kerch straits, the Sea of Azov and the peculiar two-way current under Istanbul. Then it goes below the surface, to the anoxic layer that preserves ancient shipwrecks, the surface salinity, and the deluge hypothesis that some tie to the story of Noah. The second half is history and coastlines: the Hittite Sea of Zalpa, the Greek Inhospitable Sea, Colchis and the Golden Fleece, the Kingdom of Pontus, Ovid's exile at Tomis, the Ottoman capture of Trebizond, the founding of Odesa and Sevastopol, the oldest gold in the world at Varna, the Yalta Conference, the 1936 Montreux Convention, the Winter Olympics at Sochi, the Crimean Bridge, Snake Island and the sinking of the Moskva. There are also beluga sturgeon, anchovies and monk seals. Easy questions suit anyone who can find the sea on a map; the expert tier is for geographers and historians of the region. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the sea, its straits, ports and history, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many countries have a coastline on the Black Sea?
Six
Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine share the shore, but the drainage basin takes in parts of 24 countries.
Q 02Which strait connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara?
The Bosporus
From Marmara the Dardanelles lead on to the Aegean; together the two are the Turkish Straits.
Q 03The strait through Istanbul holds which distinction among the world's straits?
The narrowest for shipping
Istanbul's 17 million people spread inland from both banks of it.
Q 04Istanbul's strait has a name meaning cattle passage, after the myth of which woman turned into a cow?
Io
She supposedly came ashore near present-day Uskudar, which was named Bous, the Cow.
Q 05The Kerch Strait links the Black Sea to which smaller sea?
The Sea of Azov
The strait is only 3.1 km across at its narrowest and was known in antiquity as the Cimmerian Bosporus.
Q 06The Sea of Azov holds which world record?
Shallowest sea
Its depth ranges from under a metre to just 14 metres, and the ancients called it the Maeotian Swamp.
Q 07What is the maximum depth of the Black Sea?
About 2,212 m
The deepest point lies in the Euxine abyssal plain just south of Yalta.
Q 08The Black Sea is the world's largest body of water with what kind of non-mixing basin?
Meromictic
Bacteria eating sunken biomass use up all the free oxygen below the mixed layer.
Q 09Roughly what share of the Black Sea's deep-water volume is anoxic, containing no oxygen?
Over 90%
That lifeless layer is why boat hulls and other organic material survive on the seabed for centuries.
Q 10The well-preserved Byzantine shipwreck Sinop D lies in the anoxic layer off which country?
Turkey
The lack of oxygen keeps wood-boring organisms out, which has made the sea a magnet for marine archaeologists.
Q 11Surface water leaves the Black Sea at a salinity of 17 PSU. What is the Mediterranean's, by comparison?
38 PSU
Denser Aegean water flows in along the bottom of the Bosporus beneath the fresher water flowing out.
Q 12Which is the principal river feeding the Black Sea, along with the Dnieper and Dniester?
The Danube
The river rises in Germany's Black Forest and passes four national capitals before reaching its delta.
Q 13Where does the delta of the sea's principal river, mostly in Romania, rank among Europe's river deltas by size?
Second largest
Only the Volga Delta is bigger, and the Danube's is the best preserved on the continent.
Q 21Which city, founded as the Greek colony Tomis, is Romania's oldest and the Black Sea's largest port?
Constanta
It only became Romanian after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, when it had barely 5,000 inhabitants.
Q 22The world's oldest gold treasure, dated 4600-4200 BC, was found in a necropolis at which Bulgarian city?
Varna
Since the site's discovery in 1974, 294 graves have yielded more than 3,000 gold objects.
Q 23In which year did the Ottomans take Trebizond, the last Byzantine successor state?
1461
The city was founded in 756 BC by colonists from Miletus and its little empire was a splinter of Byzantium after the Fourth Crusade.
Q 14The Black Sea deluge hypothesis dates the catastrophic Mediterranean flooding of a freshwater lake to when?
5600 BC
William Ryan, Walter Pitman and Petko Dimitrov published it in 1997, and some link the event to the myth of Noah's flood.
Q 15The Black Sea's earliest known name, the Sea of Zalpa, was used by the Hittites and which earlier Anatolian people?
The Hattians
The city of Zalpa probably stood near the mouth of the modern Kizil Irmak.
Q 16The Greek name Pontos Axeinos, later softened to Euxeinos, originally meant what?
Inhospitable sea
The name is thought to render an Iranian word for dark-coloured, which Greeks heard as their word for unfriendly, then flipped to hospitable after colonising it.
Q 17Which of these is NOT one of the four seas named in English after colours?
Green Sea
The White Sea is an inlet of the Barents Sea in northern Russia.
Q 18Colchis, where the Argonauts sailed, is in which modern country?
Georgia
For the ancient Greeks it marked the edge of the known world; it was also home to Medea and the Golden Fleece.
Q 19Under which king, who fought three wars against Rome, did the Kingdom of Pontus reach its greatest extent?
Mithridates VI
The kingdom was proclaimed in 281 BC and fell to the Roman Republic in 63 BC; the name Mithridates means given by Mithras.
Q 20Which Roman poet was exiled by Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea, where he spent his last years?
Ovid
He blamed a poem and a mistake but never said what the mistake was; the city is now Constanta in Romania.
Q 24Odesa was founded in 1794 by decree of which Russian ruler?
Catherine II
The site was the fortress of Khadjibey; the city's main street is named after the Spanish-born general Jose de Ribas.
Q 25Which famous title did the French aristocrat who governed Odesa from 1803 to 1814 bear?
Duc de Richelieu
He fought the plague of 1812 in the city and was later prime minister of France under Louis XVIII.
Q 26The 1905 workers' uprising in Odesa was famously supported by the crew of which Russian battleship?
Potemkin
Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film about the mutiny made the city's great staircase world-famous.
Q 27Odesa ranks where by population among Ukraine's cities?
Third
It is also the country's major seaport, on the north-western shore of the sea.
Q 28Sevastopol was founded in 1783 near the ruins of which ancient Greek city?
Chersonesus
The Greek port had been settled in the 5th century BC by colonists from Heraclea Pontica.
Q 29The 1854-55 siege of Sevastopol was the central struggle of which war?
The Crimean War
Russia lost to a French-led alliance after the allies won the Battle of the Alma and settled in for a brutal siege.
Q 30The February 1945 Roosevelt–Churchill–Stalin conference was held near which Black Sea resort?
Yalta
The Big Three met in the Livadia, Yusupov and Vorontsov palaces after Stalin refused to travel far on doctors' orders.