Uzbekistan Trivia
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48 free Uzbekistan trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Uzbekistan trivia quiz covers the doubly landlocked heart of Central Asia: the Silk Road cities of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva, the conqueror Timur and his astronomer grandson Ulugh Beg, the Registan and the Kalyan Minaret, and the slow disappearance of the Aral Sea under Soviet cotton. It also takes in modern Uzbekistan: independence in 1991, Islam Karimov's 25-year rule and the reforms that followed, the switch from Cyrillic to Latin script, plov and green tea, and a surprising sporting record in chess, boxing and gymnastics, plus a first World Cup in 2026. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference and each question carries its citation.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Besides Uzbekistan, which is the only other doubly landlocked country, with every neighbour landlocked too?
Liechtenstein
Liechtenstein, wedged between Switzerland and Austria, is the only other doubly landlocked country: both of its neighbours are themselves landlocked, just as all five of Uzbekistan's are.
Q 02Which country is Uzbekistan's only neighbour that was never a Soviet republic?
Afghanistan
Afghanistan faces Uzbekistan across a short stretch of the Amu Darya; the last Soviet troops of the Afghan war marched home over its Friendship Bridge in February 1989.
Q 03Which Uzbek city's walled inner town, Itchan Kala, was Uzbekistan's first UNESCO World Heritage Site?
Khiva
Khiva's Itchan Kala, the mud-walled inner town, housed a notorious slave market from the 17th to the 19th century; it later became Uzbekistan's first UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Q 04What is Uzbekistan's signature rice, meat, carrot and onion dish?
Plov
Plov, also called palov or osh, is so central to hospitality that a saying holds guests may leave only once it has been served; UNESCO listed Uzbek palov culture in 2016.
Q 05Which hot drink do Uzbeks pour for every guest, making it Uzbekistan's national beverage?
Green tea
Green tea is poured for guests all day in chaikhana teahouses, usually without milk or sugar; Tashkent is the exception, preferring black tea.
Q 06In Uzbek cuisine, manti, chuchvara and somsa are all what?
Stuffed pockets of dough
Stuffed pockets of dough, all three: manti are steamed, chuchvara are small boiled dumplings, and somsa are baked in a clay tandoor rather than fried like Indian samosas.
Q 07Which physician, born around 980 in what is now Uzbekistan, wrote The Canon of Medicine?
Avicenna
Avicenna, known in the East as Ibn Sina, finished The Canon of Medicine in 1025, and it went on to serve as a standard textbook in European universities for centuries.
Q 08Timur's birthplace Kesh, 80 km south of his later capital, is which modern town?
Shahrisabz
Shahrisabz, 'green city', is the old Kesh; Timur planned to be buried there and a crypt inscribed for him survives, yet he was laid to rest in his capital instead.
Q 09At the Battle of Ankara in 1402, Timur captured which Ottoman sultan?
Bayezid I
Bayezid I, 'the Thunderbolt', was taken prisoner at Ankara and died in Timur's captivity in 1403; his sons then fought an eleven-year civil war, the Ottoman Interregnum, until 1413.
Q 10Timur died in February 1405 while marching to invade which empire?
Ming China
Timur was leading his army against Ming China when he fell ill at Otrar (Farab) on the Syr Darya in February 1405; his body was carried back to his capital for burial.
Q 11Days after Soviet scientists opened Timur's tomb in June 1941, what happened?
Nazi Germany invaded the USSR
Nazi Germany invaded the USSR on 22 June 1941; legend holds that an inscription in the tomb warned that whoever disturbed it would unleash an invader more terrible than Timur, and Timur was reburied in November 1942.
Q 12How did the reign of astronomer-ruler Ulugh Beg, Timur's grandson, end in 1449?
His son had him killed
His son had him killed: Abd al-Latif rebelled, let his deposed father set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca, then had him murdered on the road.
Q 13The Registan, a square framed by three tiled madrasas, is the centrepiece of which city?
Q 21Which desert covers much of Uzbekistan between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers?
Kyzylkum
The Kyzylkum, 'red sand', fills the land between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya; the Karakum, 'black sand', lies across the border in Turkmenistan.
Q 22The Amu Darya, on Uzbekistan's southern border, was known to the ancient Greeks as what?
Oxus
The land between it and the Syr Darya (the Jaxartes) is Transoxiana, 'beyond the Oxus', the historic heart of the country.
Q 23Which neighbouring republic began in 1924 as an autonomous part of the Uzbek SSR, before splitting off in 1929?
Tajikistan
Tajikistan was created inside the Uzbek SSR as an autonomous republic and won equal status only in 1929, taking the Khujand region from Uzbekistan as it left.
Samarkand
Samarkand's Registan was where crowds gathered for royal proclamations and public executions; its oldest madrasa, Ulugh Beg's of 1417–20, predates the other two by two centuries.
Q 14In which city does the 12th-century Kalyan Minaret, nicknamed the 'Tower of Death', stand?
Bukhara
The Kalyan Minaret has stood in Bukhara since 1127; Genghis Khan is said to have spared it while razing the city in 1220, and condemned criminals were thrown from its top.
Q 15Why is Uzbekistan's turquoise-tiled Kalta Minor, whose name means 'short minaret', so squat?
It was left unfinished
It was left unfinished: Muhammad Amin Khan began the Kalta Minor in 1852 as the tallest minaret in the Muslim world, but he was killed in battle in 1855 and work stopped.
Q 16Which country shares what remains of the Aral Sea with Uzbekistan?
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan holds the northern Aral, where a dam finished in 2005 has raised the water and brought fish back, while the southern basin on the Uzbek side has largely dried out.
Q 17Soviet irrigation schemes for which thirsty crop are blamed for draining the Aral Sea?
Cotton
Cotton was the crop: Soviet planners diverted the Amu Darya and Syr Darya to irrigate it, and Uzbekistan's harvest relied on forced labour until reforms that the ILO said in 2022 had ended it.
Q 18The former Aral Sea fishing port of Moynaq became known for what?
A ship graveyard on dry land
Moynaq is known for its ship graveyard on dry land: rusting trawlers lie on the sand of the Aralkum Desert, the seabed exposed as the shore retreated more than 100 kilometres from the town.
Q 19Which autonomous republic occupies the north-west of Uzbekistan beside the shrunken Aral Sea?
Karakalpakstan
Karakalpakstan, the autonomous republic of the north-west, takes in the dried Aral seabed, so its people bear the worst of the salt and dust storms that blow off it.
Q 20Which metal is mined at Muruntau, one of the world's largest open-pit mines?
Gold
Gold: Muruntau, in the desert near Zarafshan, is among the largest open-pit gold mines on Earth; in 2006 Uzbekistan forced the US firm Newmont out of its joint venture there.
Q 24Which conqueror spent 329–327 BC subduing what is now Uzbekistan, then married the noblewoman Roxana?
Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great fought two years of revolts north of the Hindu Kush before marrying Roxana, daughter of the Bactrian noble Oxyartes, in 327 BC; she later bore his son and heir, Alexander IV.
Q 25Which Iranian people from the oases of today's Uzbekistan were the leading merchant middlemen of Asia's caravan trade?
Sogdians
The Sogdians, an Eastern Iranian people of Central Asia's oasis cities, dominated the caravan trade between China and the West, and their language served as its lingua franca for centuries.
Q 26Legend says the Islamic world's first paper mill used Chinese prisoners captured at which battle of 751?
Talas
At Talas in 751 an Abbasid army defeated Tang China; legend says captured Chinese papermakers then brought their craft west, though historians doubt it, since paper was already in use in the region decades earlier.
Q 27The word 'algorithm' comes from the Latinised name of which 9th-century mathematician?
Al-Khwarizmi
Al-Khwarizmi's name means 'the man from Khwarazm', the oasis region now split between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan; medieval translators made it 'Algoritmi', and the title of his treatise gave us 'algebra'.
Q 28Babur, a descendant of Timur born in the Fergana Valley, founded which South Asian empire?
Mughal
Babur founded the Mughal Empire only after the Uzbeks drove him from his Central Asian lands: he took Kabul in 1504, then beat the Sultan of Delhi at Panipat in 1526.
Q 29The fertile, densely populated Fergana Valley is divided between Uzbekistan and which two neighbours?
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan share the Fergana Valley with Uzbekistan; Soviet-drawn borders left a tangle of enclaves such as Sokh, a pocket of Uzbek territory entirely surrounded by Kyrgyzstan.
Q 30What name is given to the 19th-century Anglo-Russian rivalry for influence over Central Asia?
The Great Game
The Great Game got its name from Arthur Conolly, a British officer whom a Central Asian emir beheaded as a spy in 1842; Kipling's novel Kim later made the phrase famous.