Bulgaria Trivia
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59 free Bulgaria trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Bulgaria gave the world the Cyrillic alphabet, the bacterium in your yogurt, most of its rose oil and the oldest worked gold ever found. It has been an empire twice, a tsardom, a Soviet satellite and, since 2026, a member of the eurozone. Its folk song is flying past the edge of the solar system aboard the Voyager probes, and it once lined a Byzantine emperor's skull with silver to make a cup. This quiz covers geography (Musala, the Danube, the Black Sea coast), history (Asparuh's 681 founding, Simeon's golden age, five centuries of Ottoman rule, the April Uprising, Boris III and the Jews, Zhivkov and the umbrella murder), symbols and culture (the white-green-red flag, martenitsa, kukeri, banitsa and shopska salad), science and arts (Atanasoff, Christo, Canetti) and sport (the 1994 World Cup run, Kostadinova's record). Questions run from easy to expert. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and other reference pages before publishing.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007 alongside which other country?
Romania
Romania. The pair joined on 1 January 2007, taking the EU to 27 members; the next year Brussels froze some of Bulgaria's aid over its failure to tackle corruption.
Q 02Which sea forms Bulgaria's eastern coastline?
Black Sea
Black Sea. Apart from two fine natural harbours the coast has few bays, but its long sandy beaches turned it into Bulgaria's summer strip of seaside resorts.
Q 03Which river forms most of Bulgaria's northern border?
Danube
Danube. For decades a single bridge, opened at Ruse in 1954, was the only one across the border stretch; a second followed at Vidin in 2013.
Q 04Which alphabet was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire?
Cyrillic
Cyrillic. Disciples of Saints Cyril and Methodius devised it in the First Bulgarian Empire, basing it on Greek capital letters, and Bulgaria's entry in 2007 made it the EU's third official script.
Q 05Which capital of Simeon I housed the literary school usually credited with the script that replaced Glagolitic?
Preslav
Preslav. Its scholars are usually credited with adapting Greek capital letters into the new script, though some give the honour to Clement of Ohrid; Simeon's reign became a golden age of Slavic letters.
Q 06The First Bulgarian Empire was founded in 681 by Bulgars led by which khan?
Asparuh
Asparuh, a son of Kubrat, won his new realm in 680 when Emperor Constantine IV left the front to treat his gout: the Byzantine troops took it for flight, panicked and were routed.
Q 07Which Bulgarian khan is said to have used Byzantine emperor Nikephoros I's silver-lined skull as a cup after 811?
Krum
Krum trapped Nikephoros I's army in a mountain pass in 811, after the emperor had sacked the Bulgarian capital; the skull is said to have been lined with silver for his table.
Q 08Which Bulgarian ruler abolished paganism and adopted Eastern Orthodox Christianity in 864?
Boris I
Boris I took the name Michael at his baptism, later retired to a monastery, then came back out to depose his own son, who had tried to bring the old gods back.
Q 09What is Byzantine emperor Basil II, the 'Bulgar-slayer', said to have done to thousands of Bulgarian prisoners in 1014?
Blinded them
Blinded them: chroniclers say Basil II left one eye to one man in every hundred so he could lead the rest home, and that the Bulgarian ruler Samuil collapsed and died at the sight.
Q 10Which city was capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire from 1185 until it fell to the Ottomans?
Veliko Tarnovo
Veliko Tarnovo held out on its fortified hills until the Ottomans sacked it in 1393; nearly five centuries later it hosted the assembly that adopted Bulgaria's first constitution.
Q 11Which mountain pass did Bulgarian volunteers help hold in the 1877-78 war that ended Ottoman rule?
Shipka Pass
Shipka Pass was held in August 1877 against a far larger Ottoman army sent to relieve the besieged fortress of Pleven; stopped at the mountains, that army never got there, and Pleven later surrendered.
Q 12Bulgaria celebrates Liberation Day on 3 March, the date in 1878 of the treaty signed where?
San Stefano
The Treaty of San Stefano, signed on 3 March 1878, drew a 'Greater Bulgaria' that alarmed the other powers; the Congress of Berlin cut it back that July.
Q 13Which 1876 rebellion's suppression, reported as the 'Bulgarian Horrors', turned Europe against the Ottomans?
The April Uprising
Q 21On 1 March Bulgarians exchange martenitsi, red-and-white charms worn until they see what?
A stork, swallow or blossoming tree
A stork, swallow or blossoming tree, each a sign of spring, ends the wearing; many people then tie the martenitsa to a fruit tree's branch to pass their health and luck on to it.
Q 22Bulgarian kukeri, men in animal masks with huge bells, dance through villages to do what?
Scare away evil spirits
Scare away evil spirits is the whole job: the din of the bells on the dancers' belts is meant to drive them off, and so bring the village a good harvest and health for the year.
Q 23The gold hoard most often called the world's oldest, from about 4600-4200 BC, was found near which Bulgarian city?
The April Uprising was crushed with massacres, most notoriously at Batak; American reporter Januarius MacGahan's dispatches from the ruins moved Gladstone to write his pamphlet 'Bulgarian Horrors'.
Q 14Vasil Levski, Bulgaria's national hero known as the "Apostle of Freedom", died how in 1873?
Hanged by the Ottomans in Sofia
Hanged by the Ottomans in Sofia in February 1873, Levski was a former monk who had spent years building a secret network of revolutionary committees; he was caught at an inn near Lovech weeks earlier.
Q 15Bulgaria's national flag is a horizontal tricolour of which colours, top to bottom?
White, green, red
White, green, red has been the order since 1879; from the late 1940s the state emblem sat on the white stripe, and the plain tricolour only returned in November 1990.
Q 16Bulgaria adopted the euro on 1 January 2026, replacing which currency?
The lev
The lev had been pegged since 1997, first to the German mark and then to the euro, so the changeover simply used the long-fixed rate of 1.95583 leva to the euro.
Q 17Which rose variety is grown in Bulgaria's Rose Valley for its oil?
Damask rose
The Damask rose is picked by hand in the early morning in May and June around Kazanlak; about three tonnes of petals go into one kilo of oil, which is why it sells for thousands of dollars.
Q 18In 1905 Bulgarian medical student Stamen Grigorov identified the bacterium behind which fermented food?
Yogurt
Yogurt is soured by Lactobacillus bulgaricus, which Grigorov found in samples of Bulgarian yogurt; Nobel laureate Ilya Mechnikov then credited it for Bulgarian peasants' long lives and promoted yogurt across Europe.
Q 19Bulgaria's Shopska salad of tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers is topped with a thick layer of what?
Sirene (white brined cheese)
Sirene (white brined cheese), grated thickly, blankets the tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and peppers, so the salad's colours echo the national flag.
Q 20Bulgarians traditionally hide lucky charms in a banitsa pastry on which occasion?
New Year's Eve
On New Year's Eve the banitsa is cut so that everyone at the table gets a charm that foretells their year; cooks once tucked in cornel twigs, whose number of buds stood for different kinds of luck.
Varna
Varna's Copper Age cemetery was found by accident in 1972 by an excavator operator, Raycho Marinov; its graves held some 3,000 gold objects weighing about six kilos.
Q 24Which Bulgarian city, renamed Philippopolis by Alexander the Great's father, is among Europe's oldest continuously inhabited cities?
Plovdiv
Plovdiv is still called the City of the Seven Hills, though only six remain: one of them was levelled in the early 20th century.
Q 25Musala, at 2,925 m, is the highest peak in Bulgaria and the whole of what?
The Balkan Peninsula
The Balkan Peninsula has no higher point than Musala: the Bulgarian peak tops even Greece's Mount Olympus, the mythical home of the gods, by about eight metres.
Q 26Bulgaria's largest monastery, a 10th-century World Heritage Site, is named after which hermit saint?
Ivan of Rila
Ivan of Rila lived as a hermit in a cave nearby; the monastery grew from the followers who gathered around him.
Q 27The 8th-century Madara Rider rock relief shows a horseman doing what?
Spearing a lion
Spearing a lion that lies at his horse's feet, while a dog runs behind; in a 2008 public vote Bulgarians chose the rider for their future euro coins, and he now appears on the cents.
Q 28Bulgarian-born actress Nina Dobrev starred in which TV drama?
The Vampire Diaries
The Vampire Diaries cast Nina Dobrev, who left Bulgaria at two and still speaks the language with her family, as Elena, and made her centuries-old vampire double a Bulgarian too: Katerina Petrova.
Q 29A Bulgarian folk song sung by Valya Balkanska left Earth in 1977 on a golden record aboard which spacecraft?
Voyager
Voyager: both probes carry her song, taped in the late 1960s by a visiting American folklorist, on a gold-plated disc meant for any alien finders, and both have since crossed into interstellar space.
Q 30How was Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov murdered in London in 1978?
A poisoned pellet fired from an umbrella
A poisoned pellet fired from an umbrella struck Markov's thigh as he waited for a bus on Waterloo Bridge; he died within days, and the tiny hollow pellet is thought to have held ricin.