Warsaw Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
46 free Warsaw trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Warsaw trivia quiz covers the Polish capital from a fishing village on the Vistula to the skyscraper city it is today. The easy questions are ones any visitor could answer: the river, the mermaid on the coat of arms, the king who moved the capital from Kraków, the composer whose heart rests in Holy Cross Church, and the giant Stalinist palace on Parade Square. The harder end is for history readers and people who know the city well: the Warsaw Confederation of 1573, the three-day battle against Sweden in 1656, the Miracle on the Vistula in 1920, the Ghetto Uprising and the 63-day Warsaw Uprising of 1944, the reconstruction of the Old Town that UNESCO listed in 1980, the radio mast that was once the tallest structure on Earth, and the tower that is now the tallest building in the European Union. Legia, the metro, Chopin Airport and the Copernicus Science Centre get questions too. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the city, its landmarks and its battles before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Poland, Budapest and Prague quizzes next.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Warsaw's river flows north across Poland into which sea?
Baltic Sea
The Baltic Sea: for centuries Poland's grain was floated down Warsaw's river to the port of Gdańsk at its mouth and shipped out across the sea.
Q 02Warsaw is the capital of which voivodeship?
Masovian
Masovian: the region was a separate duchy with Warsaw as its seat until the ducal line died out in 1526, when the Polish crown absorbed it.
Q 03Which king moved the Polish court and capital from Kraków to Warsaw?
Sigismund III Vasa
Sigismund III Vasa began remodelling Warsaw's castle in 1596 and had settled his court there by 1611: the city lay between Kraków and Vilnius, the capitals of the Commonwealth's two halves.
Q 04What mythical creature appears on Warsaw's coat of arms?
A mermaid
A mermaid, the syrenka: in one legend she led a prince to the spot and told him to found a city there, and the arms show her with a sword and shield in hand.
Q 05Which Warsaw district lies on the east bank of the river?
Praga
Praga is Warsaw's historic district on the river's east bank, facing the Old Town; it kept much of its pre-war tenement housing because it escaped the 1944 destruction of the left bank.
Q 06What is a native of Warsaw called in English?
Varsovian
Varsovian is built on Varsovia, the city's Latin name, rather than on the English 'Warsaw'; the same root names the varsovienne, a ballroom dance on a mazurka step.
Q 07Which queen was accused of poisoning Warsaw's last duke, Janusz III, in 1526?
Bona Sforza
Bona Sforza, Poland's Italian-born queen, was blamed by rumour because the young duke's lands fell to the crown when he died without an heir; the king's own inquiry found no foul play.
Q 08What did the 1573 Warsaw Confederation formally establish in the Commonwealth?
Religious freedom
Religious freedom: with the throne empty, nobles of rival faiths pledged to keep the peace over religion, and the pledge went into the oath every later king had to swear before he could reign.
Q 09Which two powers beat a larger Polish-Lithuanian army near Warsaw in July 1656?
Sweden and Brandenburg
Sweden and Brandenburg, led by Charles X Gustav and Elector Frederick William, beat John II Casimir's larger Polish-Lithuanian army in the three-day Battle of Warsaw of 28–30 July 1656, a win that gained them little.
Q 10Which power annexed Warsaw in the final partition of Poland in 1795?
Prussia
Warsaw became capital of the province of South Prussia until Napoleon arrived.
Q 11Which exiled French king lived in Warsaw under the alias Comte de Lille?
Louis XVIII
Louis XVIII, then only a claimant in exile, refused Napoleon's bid to make him give up his claim to the crown; he reached the French throne a decade later.
Q 12Which German cipher machine did Polish mathematicians first break in Warsaw in 1932?
Enigma
Enigma: Marian Rejewski worked out its wiring at the Cipher Bureau, and five weeks before the war the Poles handed their methods to British and French codebreakers at a meeting just outside Warsaw.
Q 13In the 1897 census, where did Warsaw rank among the cities of the Russian Empire by population?
Third
Third: only St Petersburg and Moscow counted more people, so a Polish city outranked every other city in the tsar's empire, Odessa and Kiev included.
Q 21How did Warsaw Uprising fighters slip between districts cut off by German lines in 1944?
Through the sewers
Through the sewers: they were the main link between the insurgent districts, and thousands of people left the Old Town through them when it fell, the story told in Andrzej Wajda's film Kanał.
Q 22Which Oscar-winning 2002 film follows Władysław Szpilman's survival in the ruins of wartime Warsaw?
The Pianist
The Pianist: late in the film a German officer, Wilm Hosenfeld, finds Szpilman hiding in the ruins and helps him survive instead of handing him over, as happened in life.
Q 23Which city became Poland's transitional seat of government while Warsaw lay in ruins?
Łódź
Q 14The 1920 Battle of Warsaw against the Red Army is known by what nickname?
The Miracle on the Vistula
The Miracle on the Vistula was coined ironically by the publicist Stanisław Stroński, who doubted the army's leadership; the phrase stuck as a badge of honour for the August 1920 victory.
Q 15Who commanded the Polish counterattack from the south on 16 August 1920?
Józef Piłsudski
Józef Piłsudski personally led the strike group that attacked from the Wieprz River on 16 August 1920, hitting the Red Army's flank and forcing a disorganised Soviet retreat.
Q 16Which Warsaw Ghetto orphanage director refused to escape without his children?
Janusz Korczak
Janusz Korczak, a doctor who wrote under that pen name, turned down friends' pleas to flee and went with his orphans when the whole home was deported to its death in August 1942.
Q 17To which extermination camp were most Warsaw Ghetto Jews deported in 1942?
Treblinka
Treblinka: more than a quarter of a million people were sent there from the ghetto in the summer of 1942, packed into trains under the pretence of 'resettlement in the East'.
Q 18Which chancellor knelt in 1970 before Warsaw's memorial to the 1943 Ghetto Uprising?
Willy Brandt
Willy Brandt sank to his knees after laying a wreath, a silent gesture of humility that was photographed around the world; he won the Nobel Peace Prize the following year.
Q 19What sounds across Warsaw at 5 pm each 1 August, the Uprising's anniversary?
Sirens
Sirens: at 'W-Hour' the alarms wail and trams, cars and people on the pavements stop where they are for a minute, in tribute to the insurgents who fought for 63 days.
Q 20Which Polish underground force led the 1944 Warsaw Uprising?
The Home Army
The Home Army, loyal to Poland's government-in-exile in London, rose on 1 August 1944 hoping to free the capital itself before the advancing Red Army could install an administration of its own.
Łódź, largely undamaged in the war, housed much of Poland's government and cultural life in 1945 while Warsaw was being rebuilt; Warsaw nonetheless remained the official capital.
Q 24The Palace of Culture and Science was a gift from which country?
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union built the palace in the early 1950s as a 'gift of the Soviet people'; it was originally named after Joseph Stalin, a dedication dropped during destalinisation.
Q 25Which band's 1967 shows at Warsaw's Palace of Culture were among the first by a Western rock act behind the Iron Curtain?
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones played two shows in the palace's Congress Hall on 13 April 1967; the audience had been warned to behave, and a riot broke out all the same.
Q 26What world record did Warsaw's Palace of Culture hold from the millennium celebrations until 2002?
World's tallest clock tower
The four clock faces added for the millennium made the palace the world's tallest clock tower; the NTT Docomo Yoyogi Building in Tokyo took that record in 2002.
Q 27Warsaw's Old Town is on UNESCO's World Heritage list as an outstanding example of what?
Near-total reconstruction
Near-total reconstruction: more than 85% of the historic centre was destroyed in 1944, and its citizens rebuilt it within a few years, working from records that included Bernardo Bellotto's 18th-century views.
Q 28How was the 1970s rebuilding of Warsaw's Royal Castle mostly paid for?
Public donations
Public donations: the decision to rebuild was put off again and again until 1971, when it was agreed to do it from voluntary gifts, collected by committees in Poland and abroad.
Q 29The bronze king on the column in Warsaw's Castle Square holds a cross in one hand and which weapon in the other?
A sabre
A sabre: German troops brought the column down in 1944, but the bronze king survived the fall and in 1949 was set up again, cross and sabre in hand, on a new granite shaft.
Q 30Wilanów Palace was built for which Polish king?
John III Sobieski
Wilanów Palace was built for John III Sobieski between 1677 and 1696 as a summer residence; it survived both world wars largely intact, unlike most of Warsaw's palaces.