Tajikistan Trivia
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49 free Tajikistan trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Tajikistan is the mountain republic of Central Asia, more than 90% highland and the only one of the five 'stans' with a Persian-speaking majority. This quiz climbs through its history: Sogdiana and the Silk Road, Alexander and the Greco-Bactrians, the Samanid emirs who revived Persian culture, Tamerlane, the Emirate of Bukhara, the Russian conquest, the Soviet republic carved out in 1929 with a capital in a village named after a Monday market, independence in 1991 and the civil war that followed. Easy questions ask for the capital, the neighbours, the mountains and the religion; the harder ones want the peak once called Stalin Peak, the meaning of 'Dushanbe', the currency named after a medieval emir, the dam that was the tallest in the world, the language that is the last descendant of Sogdian and the president who has ruled since 1994. There is also oshi palav, qurutob, buzkashi, Nowruz, hammer-throw gold medals, a shock run to the Asian Cup quarter-finals and one of the tallest flagpoles on Earth. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the country, its capital and its history, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital and largest city of Tajikistan?
Dushanbe
Dushanbe, in the west of the country, was a small market village when it became the Tajik capital in 1924; it bore the name Stalinabad until 1961.
Q 02The name of Tajikistan's capital means what in Persian?
Monday
The capital's name is the Persian word for Monday: du (two) plus shanbe (Saturday), the second day after Saturday, because the village's weekly bazaar was held on Mondays.
Q 03Tajikistan's mountain meltwater feeds the Amu Darya, which Soviet irrigation diverted from what sea?
Aral Sea
The Aral Sea shrank and split into separate lakes after canals drew off the Amu Darya from the 1960s, and in 2014 its eastern basin dried up completely.
Q 04Which country lies along Tajikistan's southern border, marked by the Amu Darya and Panj rivers?
Afghanistan
Afghanistan lies across the Panj and Amu Darya rivers along Tajikistan's entire southern border, a frontier that Moscow's border troops patrolled until they handed it over in 2005.
Q 05Tajikistan's independence followed a failed 1991 coup against which Soviet leader?
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev survived the August 1991 coup, but Tajikistan's party chief, who had backed the plotters, was forced to resign, and the republic declared independence on 9 September.
Q 06Who won Tajikistan's November 1994 presidential election?
Emomali Rahmon
Emomali Rahmon, who had led the country since late 1992 as chairman of the Supreme Soviet, won the November 1994 vote and received the title 'Leader of the Nation', with lifelong immunity, in 2015.
Q 07Unlike other varieties of Persian, Tajik has been written since the late 1930s in which alphabet?
Cyrillic
Cyrillic replaced a Latin script that Soviet planners had brought in only about a decade earlier in place of the Perso-Arabic one, which distanced Tajiks from the Persian written elsewhere in Arabic letters.
Q 08Under the constitution, which language is Tajikistan's official 'language of inter-ethnic communication'?
Russian
Russian is named in the 1994 constitution as the language of inter-ethnic communication, alongside Tajik as the state language; ethnic Russians fell from 7.6% of the population in 1989 to about 0.5% by 2010.
Q 09What is Tajikistan's currency, introduced in 2000 to replace the Tajik rouble?
Somoni
The Somoni replaced the Tajik rouble in October 2000 at one to 1,000 and is divided into 100 dirams; it honours a medieval emir whose statue stands in the centre of the capital.
Q 10Tajikistan's highest mountain, at 7,495 metres, was known by what name from 1962 to 1998?
Communism Peak
Communism Peak was the name from 1962 to 1998 of the 7,495-metre summit, the highest point in the Soviet Union; it had been Stalin Peak from 1933 and was renamed again in 1998.
Q 11Which 9th-10th century Transoxiana dynasty revived Persian culture and is claimed as the first Tajik state?
The Samanids
The Samanids ruled Transoxiana and Khorasan and made Persian a language of court and literature again, until the Kara-Khanids seized their capital in 999 and ended the dynasty.
Q 12Which 10th-century poet, the first great voice of New Persian, is a Tajik national icon?
Rudaki
Rudaki (c. 858-941) is regarded as the father of New Persian poetry; only fragments of his verse survive, and the capital's main avenue and a central park bear his name.
Q 13Northern Tajikistan, including Khujand and Panjakent, belonged to which ancient Silk Road civilisation?
Sogdiana
Q 21Which metal, smelted at the giant TALCO plant in Tursunzoda, is one of Tajikistan's main exports?
Aluminium
Aluminium is smelted by TALCO, once known as TadAZ, at the largest plant of its kind in Central Asia; the raw material is not local, so the smelter runs on alumina imported from abroad.
Q 22Which kind of dish is Tajikistan's UNESCO-listed national dish, known locally as osh?
A rice pilaf
A rice pilaf: oshi palav joined UNESCO's heritage list in 2016, and a Tajik saying has it that if you have eaten someone's osh you owe them respect for 40 years.
Q 23Qurutob, a traditional Tajik dish, is made from pieces of flatbread soaked in what?
Yoghurt or dried-curd sauce
Sogdiana, centred on the Zeravshan valley, was home to the merchants who dominated Silk Road trade between China and Persia from the 4th to the 8th centuries; Panjakent's ruins preserve their murals.
Q 14Which historic Tajik cities were left in Uzbekistan when the Soviets drew Tajikistan in 1924?
Bukhara and Samarkand
Bukhara and Samarkand, the great Persian-speaking cities of Transoxiana, went to the Uzbek SSR when the borders were drawn, a decision the two republics' leaders argued over bitterly before Tajikistan became a full republic in 1929.
Q 15Which crop, nicknamed 'white gold', made Tajikistan the Soviet Union's third-largest producer by the 1960s?
Cotton
Cotton was the crop Soviet planners pushed across Central Asia; Tajikistan became the USSR's third-largest grower by the 1960s, and its economy still leans on cotton exports.
Q 16Until its 2015 ban, Tajikistan's leading opposition party was Central Asia's only legal party of which kind?
Islamist
Islamist: the Islamic Renaissance Party, the core of the opposition that signed the 1997 peace accord, stayed legal until 2015, when the government banned it and branded it a terrorist organisation.
Q 17Tajikistan's flag has red, white and green stripes with what emblem in the centre?
A crown under seven stars
A crown under seven stars sits on the white central stripe of the flag adopted in November 1992, which kept the red, white and green of the Soviet-era Tajik flag; seven stands for perfection in Persian tradition.
Q 18The flagpole outside the capital's Palace of Nations held what record from 2011 to 2014?
World's tallest
World's tallest flagpole was the record the 165-metre pole in the capital held from 2011 until the 171-metre Jeddah Flagpole beat it by six metres in 2014; its flag measures 30 by 60 metres.
Q 19The Nurek Dam on the Vakhsh River held what world record when it was completed in 1980?
Tallest dam
Tallest dam in the world was Nurek's title from its completion in 1980 until China's Jinping-I topped its roughly 300 metres in 2013; the Rogun Dam upstream is designed to rise to 335 metres.
Q 20Tajikistan's economy is among the most dependent in the world on which source of income?
Remittances from migrant workers
Remittances from migrant workers, most of them working abroad, have been worth between a quarter and a half of Tajikistan's GDP every year since the late 2000s, one of the highest shares in the world.
Yoghurt or dried-curd sauce: the name comes from qurut, balls of dried salted curd that are dissolved in water to soak pieces of fatir flatbread, then topped with onions, herbs and oil and eaten by hand.
Q 24In the traditional horseback game of buzkashi, played at spring festivals, riders compete to carry what?
A dead goat
A dead goat is the 'ball' in buzkashi: riders fight for the headless carcass, then must ride clear of the pack and drop it in a scoring circle, playing solo or in teams.
Q 25Gushtigiri, Tajikistan's national sport, is a form of what?
Wrestling
Wrestling: gushtigiri is fought in robes, each man gripping the other's belt, and by tradition children open a tournament, then teenagers, with the champions going last.
Q 26Tajik athletes won Olympic gold in 1992 and 2016 in which athletics event?
Hammer throw
Hammer throw: Andrey Abduvaliyev won for the Unified Team in Barcelona in 1992 and Dilshod Nazarov won for Tajikistan in Rio in 2016, the country's first Olympic gold as an independent nation.
Q 27At the 2023 AFC Asian Cup, Tajikistan's footballers made their debut and reached which stage?
The quarter-finals
The quarter-finals: the tournament's only newcomers came through their group and a knockout tie before going out 1-0 to eventual runners-up Jordan, beaten by an own goal.
Q 28Which spring festival, marking the equinox on 21 March, is Tajikistan's most important holiday?
Nowruz
Nowruz, the Persian new year at the spring equinox, is marked in Tajikistan with several days of public holidays from 21 March; Mehrgon is the autumn harvest festival and Sada falls fifty days before the new year.
Q 29In the late 1980s Tajik artisans built an ornate tea house as a gift to which American sister city?
Boulder, Colorado
Boulder, Colorado, has been the Tajik capital's sister city since 1987; forty artisans carved the teahouse and shipped it in about 200 crates, which sat in storage for nearly a decade before it opened in 1998.
Q 30By what abbreviation is the autonomous region covering the mountainous eastern half of Tajikistan known?
GBAO
GBAO stands for Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast, the thinly populated eastern region whose capital is Khorugh; it covers about 45% of Tajikistan's territory but holds only around 2% of its people.