Armenia Trivia
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47 free Armenia trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Armenia was the first state on earth to adopt Christianity, in AD 301, and its alphabet, its cross-stones and its churches have carried an identity through empires, partitions and the genocide of 1915. This quiz covers the country from Urartu and Yerevan's founding in 782 BC through Tigranes the Great, Gregory the Illuminator, Mesrop Mashtots and the Bagratids to the First Republic of 1918, Soviet rule, the Spitak earthquake, independence in 1991, the wars over Nagorno-Karabakh, the Velvet Revolution and the 2025 peace declaration. Geography and culture get their share: Mount Aragats and Lake Sevan, Ararat as the symbol across the border, the world's oldest leather shoe and oldest winery at Areni, lavash and the duduk on UNESCO's lists, khachkars, Ararat brandy, apricots, Etchmiadzin, Geghard, Garni and the Wings of Tatev cableway. There are questions on chess champions Petrosian and Aronian, Khachaturian's Sabre Dance, Aznavour, the diaspora, the dram and the Yerevan Metro. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Armenia, its history, sites and people, so the dates, heights and names are reliable.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Armenia is a landlocked country bordered by Georgia, Azerbaijan, Iran and which country to the west?
Turkey
Turkey. Ankara shut that border in 1993 to back Azerbaijan in its war with Armenia, and it was still closed more than 30 years later.
Q 02Around AD 301, Armenia became the first state in the world to do what?
Adopt Christianity as its official religion
Adopt Christianity as its official religion. Tradition says King Tiridates III kept Gregory the Illuminator in a pit for over a decade, then freed him and was baptised by him.
Q 03What is the native name Armenians use for Armenia?
Hayastan
Hayastan. Armenians call themselves Hay, and tradition traces the name to Hayk, a legendary archer said to have freed his people by killing the Babylonian tyrant Bel.
Q 04Which Iron Age kingdom around Lake Van, a rival of Assyria, ruled the Armenian highlands before the Armenians?
Urartu
Urartu. Its engineers cut a canal that still carries water to Van more than 2,500 years on, and the Armenians succeeded the kingdom in the 6th century BC.
Q 05Which Armenian city grew from Erebuni, a fortress whose founding in the 8th century BC is recorded on a cuneiform slab?
Yerevan
Yerevan. The slab, unearthed in 1950, records a king founding the fortress, and the city counts its age from it: it celebrated its 2,800th birthday in 2018.
Q 06Under which king, between 95 and 66 BC, was Armenia the most powerful kingdom east of the Roman Republic?
Tigranes the Great
Tigranes the Great. He took the title King of Kings and ruled from the Caspian Sea to Syria, until Rome's Pompey invaded in 66 BC and stripped him of his conquests.
Q 07Which singer and Oscar-winning actress, born with the surname Sarkisian, flew to Armenia on a relief cargo plane in 1993?
Cher
Cher. Her father's family was Armenian, and she arrived with 45 tons of medical supplies, books and toys at a time when the blockaded country had little heat or light.
Q 08Who invented the Armenian alphabet around AD 405?
Mesrop Mashtots
Mesrop Mashtots. The monk devised the letters so the Bible could be put into Armenian, and the 36 he created are still in use with only a few added since.
Q 09The Armenian mother church at Vagharshapat, founded in the early 300s, is often called the world's oldest what?
Cathedral
Cathedral. In the founding legend, Gregory the Illuminator saw a figure descend from heaven and strike the ground with a golden hammer to mark the spot; the church has been rebuilt there more than once since.
Q 10Which medieval Armenian capital, nicknamed the 'City of 1,001 Churches', now lies in ruins?
Ani
Ani. Capital of the Bagratid kings until 1045, it was sacked by the Mongols, shaken by an earthquake in 1319 and finally left behind when the trade routes moved away.
Q 11Cilician Armenia, an ally of the Crusaders, lay on the coast of which sea?
The Mediterranean
The Mediterranean. Armenians fleeing the Seljuk invasions founded the kingdom far from their homeland, and it outlived its Crusader allies on the mainland before falling to the Mamluks in 1375.
Q 12Which two empires divided the Armenian homeland between them from the 16th century?
The Ottoman and Persian
The Ottoman and Persian empires fought over the land for more than a century before a 1639 treaty settled the line, and the Persian share passed to the tsars in 1828.
Q 13The 1915 genocide is dated from 24 April, when hundreds of Armenian community leaders were arrested in which Ottoman city?
Constantinople
Q 21With Mount Ararat lying beyond the border, which four-peaked volcano is the highest point in Armenia?
Aragats
Mount Aragats. Its summit stands about a kilometre lower than Ararat's, and in 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, Soviet physicists built a cosmic-ray station 3,200 metres up its slopes.
Q 22Lake Sevan, a vast freshwater lake lying 1,900 metres up, fills a basin in which mountainous region?
The Caucasus
The Caucasus. Soviet power stations on its outflow let the lake's level fall so far that a 49 km tunnel was bored through the mountains to feed it from another river.
Q 23What is Armenia's currency, introduced in 1993?
The dram
The dram. Armenia kept the rouble after independence until Moscow pulled out of the shared currency zone in July 1993, leaving its neighbours no choice but to print money of their own.
Constantinople. About 250 community leaders were seized in the capital that night and most were later killed; Armenia mourns its dead, 1.5 million by its own count, each 24 April.
Q 14Which Ottoman interior minister, shot dead in Berlin in 1921 by an Armenian student, ordered the deportations of 1915?
Talaat Pasha
Talaat Pasha. His killer admitted the shooting in court, saying 'I have killed a man, but I am not a murderer', and the Berlin jury acquitted him.
Q 15Which US president broke with his predecessors' caution towards a NATO ally by formally calling the 1915 Armenian killings a genocide?
Joe Biden
Joe Biden. His statement came on the 24 April anniversary in 2021; Ronald Reagan had used the word in passing in 1981, but every president after him avoided it for fear of angering Ankara.
Q 16Which Soviet leader cut short a New York visit to fly to Armenia after the Spitak earthquake?
Gorbachev
Gorbachev. He had just arrived in New York when the quake struck in December 1988; he flew home early, and the Kremlin appealed for outside help, which America answered with medical aid and sniffer dogs.
Q 17Which volcanic rock gives the buildings of Armenia's 'Pink City' capital their colour?
Tuff
Tuff. Soviet builders remade the city from the 1920s to architect Alexander Tamanian's plan in this local stone, formed of compacted ash, so whole avenues glow pink, brightest at sunrise and sunset.
Q 18Which breakaway region, known to Armenians as Artsakh, did Azerbaijan retake in September 2023?
Nagorno-Karabakh
Nagorno-Karabakh. After a blockade lasting months and an offensive that was over within days, more than 100,000 of its roughly 120,000 Armenians fled within weeks.
Q 19Nikol Pashinyan came to power in 2018 after protests he called what?
A velvet revolution
A velvet revolution. Pashinyan, a former newspaper editor, began with a two-week protest walk across the country; ten days after it ended, Serzh Sargsyan resigned, saying 'I was wrong'.
Q 20In August 2025 Pashinyan and Ilham Aliyev signed a peace declaration at which venue?
The White House
The White House. The deal gave the United States exclusive rights to develop a transit corridor through Armenia, to be named the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity.
Q 24Which Grammy-winning metal band, whose four members are all of Armenian descent, first played in Armenia in 2015?
System of a Down
System of a Down. The band formed in California's Armenian diaspora and closed a tour marking the genocide's centenary with a free concert in the capital's main square.
Q 25The Areni-1 cave complex yielded the world's oldest known leather shoe and oldest known what?
Winery
Winery. Its makers apparently trod grapes barefoot in a press set beside a fermentation vat, and because the cave was a burial site the wine may have been meant for the dead.
Q 26Which Armenian flatbread was inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2014?
Lavash
Lavash. Dried, it keeps for up to six months, and at Armenian weddings a sheet is draped over the newlyweds' shoulders to bring them fertility and prosperity.
Q 27The duduk, Armenia's mournful double-reed instrument, is made from the wood of which tree?
Apricot
Apricot. UNESCO lists the duduk and its music as Armenian heritage, and Djivan Gasparyan carried its sound into Hollywood when Hans Zimmer sought him out for the Gladiator soundtrack.
Q 28What is a khachkar?
A carved memorial cross-stone
A khachkar is a carved memorial cross-stone, each with its own design. The greatest field of them, once about 10,000 strong at Julfa in Nakhchivan, was destroyed down to the last stone by 2006.
Q 29The monastery of Geghard takes its name from which relic once kept there?
The spear that wounded Jesus
The spear that wounded Jesus. Geghard means 'spear': tradition says the apostle Thaddeus brought the lance to Armenia, and after 500 years at the monastery it moved to the treasury at Etchmiadzin.
Q 30Garni, Armenia's lone standing Greco-Roman temple, is usually said to have honoured Mihr, the god of what?
The sun
The sun. Others read the building as a royal tomb; either way it fell in 1679, lay in pieces for nearly three centuries and was put back together in 1969-75 largely from its own stones.