Athens Trivia
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59 free Athens trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Athens has 3,400 years of recorded history and this quiz uses most of them. It begins with the myth of Athena's olive tree and Poseidon's spring, moves through Cleisthenes' democracy, Marathon and Salamis, Pericles' building programme, ostracism and the Peloponnesian War, and then follows the city into obscurity: Justinian closing the philosophy schools in 529, the Frankish dukes, Mehmed II riding in in 1458, the Venetian shell that blew up the Parthenon in 1687, and Lord Elgin's crates. The modern city gets equal time: King Otto's Bavarian planners and a capital of 4,000 people, the 1896 Games in the marble Panathenaic Stadium, the 1922 refugees who brought rebetiko, the smog years, the 2004 Olympics and the metro that doubles as an archaeological museum. Landmarks include the Acropolis and its museum, the Erechtheion's Caryatids, Hadrian's Temple of Olympian Zeus, Lycabettus, Syntagma and the Evzones, Plaka and Anafiotika, Piraeus and the football derby of the eternal enemies. There is also Europe's record temperature and the world's biggest count of theatre stages. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Athens and its monuments, events and institutions, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Our Ancient Greece and Greece quizzes go wider.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the founding myth, Athena won patronage of the city by giving Athenians what?
The first domesticated olive tree
Athena struck the rock and produced the first domesticated olive tree, judged more useful than Poseidon's salt spring; the olive became the emblem of the city and of its coinage.
Q 02How do modern scholars think Athens and Athena got their matching names?
The deity was named after the place
Most scholars hold that the deity was named after the place: the ending -ene is common in Greek place names but rare in personal names, and the root is probably pre-Greek.
Q 03Ancient Athenians were nicknamed Tettigophoroi, meaning wearers of what?
Golden cicada pins
Thucydides notes older Athenians fastened their hair with golden cicada pins; the cicada, believed born from the earth, symbolised the Athenians' claim to be autochthonous like the legendary earth-born Erechtheus.
Q 04Who introduced democracy to Athens in 508 BC?
Cleisthenes
Solon's reforms had paved the way a century earlier; Cleisthenes reorganised citizens into ten tribes by residence rather than wealth.
Q 05Which Athenian general led the victory over the Persians at Marathon in 490 BC?
Miltiades
Miltiades persuaded his fellow generals to attack and led the hoplite charge that routed the Persians at Marathon in 490 BC; Themistocles' naval victory at Salamis came ten years later.
Q 06Which statesman guided the building programme that produced the Parthenon?
Pericles
Pericles, Athens' dominant statesman for some three decades, channelled Delian League tribute into the Acropolis building programme, with the sculptor Phidias overseeing the Parthenon's construction.
Q 07What was ostracism in Athenian democracy?
Exiling citizens seen as threats to the state
Citizens scratched names on potsherds; it let the Assembly restrain powerful men without harsher punishment.
Q 08Construction of the Parthenon began in which year?
447 BC
Work on the Parthenon began in 447 BC, with Ictinus and Callicrates as architects; the temple was finished in 438 BC and its sculptural decoration completed in 432 BC.
Q 09The Acropolis rock rises how far above sea level?
150 m
The Acropolis rises about 150 m above sea level; its flat top covers roughly 3 hectares and held a Mycenaean fortress before the classical temples were built.
Q 10What is the monumental gateway at the western end of the Acropolis called?
The Propylaea
The Propylaea, designed by Mnesicles and begun in 437 BC, forms the monumental western entrance to the Acropolis; the small Temple of Athena Nike stands on a bastion beside it.
Q 11The Erechtheion's Porch of the Maidens is held up by how many sculpted female figures?
Six
Six Caryatids support the porch; Elgin's agents removed one, now in the British Museum, while the other five are displayed in the Acropolis Museum, with replicas standing on the building.
Q 12The Parthenon was badly damaged in 1687 when a Venetian bomb hit what inside it?
An Ottoman munitions store
The Ottomans had turned the temple-turned-mosque into a powder magazine during Morosini's siege.
Q 13Roughly what share of the surviving Parthenon sculptures did Elgin's agents remove between 1801 and 1812?
About half
Elgin's agents removed about half of the surviving Parthenon sculptures, including much of the frieze; Parliament bought them for the British Museum in 1816 after an inquiry upheld the acquisition.
Q 21Which Greek won the marathon at the 1896 Olympics, to the delight of the home crowd?
Spyridon Louis
Spyridon Louis, a water-carrier from the outskirts of Athens, won the 1896 marathon in 2 hours 58 minutes 50 seconds ahead of fellow Greek Charilaos Vasilakos, as the packed Panathenaic Stadium erupted.
Q 22The marathon race takes its name from the legend of which Greek messenger?
Pheidippides
Pheidippides, in the legend told by Plutarch and Lucian, ran from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens in 490 BC to announce victory and died; Herodotus records only his run to Sparta.
Q 23Athens and its port of Piraeus lie on the shore of which gulf?
The Saronic Gulf
Q 14Which Roman emperor finished Athens' Temple of Olympian Zeus some 638 years after it began?
Hadrian
Hadrian dedicated the Temple of Olympian Zeus in about 131 AD; it had 104 Corinthian columns and was the largest temple in Greece, and 16 survive, one of which fell in an 1852 storm.
Q 15Which emperor's 529 ban on pagan philosophy teaching is usually taken as the end of ancient Athens?
Justinian I
Justinian I's edict of 529 banned pagans from teaching, closing the Neoplatonic Academy in Athens; the city had remained a philosophical centre that had taught the future emperor Julian.
Q 16Which sultan captured Athens in 1458 and forbade the looting of its monuments on pain of death?
Mehmed II
Mehmed II, conqueror of Constantinople five years earlier, took Athens in 1458 and, impressed by its antiquities, issued a firman forbidding their looting or destruction on pain of death.
Q 17Athens replaced which city as capital of independent Greece in 1834?
Nafplio
Nafplio, in the Peloponnese, had been the first capital of independent Greece; in 1834 King Otto moved the government to Athens, chosen for its classical past though war had left it a small town.
Q 18Greece's first king, who commissioned a modern city plan for Athens, came from which country?
Bavaria
Otto, son of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, became Greece's first king in 1832; he commissioned the architects Stamatios Kleanthis and Eduard Schaubert to draw up a neoclassical plan for the new capital.
Q 19The Panathenaic Stadium is the only stadium in the world built entirely of what?
Marble
The Panathenaic Stadium is built entirely of white Pentelic marble, hence its nickname Kallimarmaro ('beautiful marble'); rebuilt in marble in the 2nd century AD, it was restored for the first modern Olympics.
Q 20The first modern Olympic Games opened in Athens on which date?
6 April 1896
The Games opened on 6 April 1896 (25 March in the Julian calendar then used in Greece), when King George I declared them open in the Panathenaic Stadium; James Connolly won the triple jump that day.
Athens and Piraeus face the Saronic Gulf, an arm of the Aegean whose islands Salamis and Aegina lie within sight of the city; the Corinthian Gulf is beyond the isthmus to the west.
Q 24Which architect added steel arches and a glass roof to the Athens Olympic Stadium for 2004?
Santiago Calatrava
Santiago Calatrava's renovation crowned the Olympic Stadium with two steel arches spanning over 300 m carrying a translucent roof, finished only weeks before the 2004 opening ceremony.
Q 25What did the 1922 refugees from Asia Minor bring to Athens that later became the basis of Greek popular music?
Rebetiko
The refugees of 1922, settled after the population exchange with Turkey, brought rebetiko, the urban song style of Smyrna and Constantinople, which became the basis of Greek laiko popular music.
Q 26What are the kilted Greek presidential guards outside Parliament at Syntagma called?
Evzones
Evzones of the Presidential Guard wear the pleated fustanella kilt and pom-pommed tsarouchia shoes, a uniform recalling the mountain fighters of the War of Independence; they change guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Q 27Which hill is the highest point in central Athens at 277 m?
Lycabettus
Lycabettus rises to 277 m; myth says Athena dropped the rock there while carrying it to fortify the Acropolis, and a funicular climbs to the chapel of St George on its summit.
Q 28Which is the tallest of the four mountains ringing the Athens basin, at 1,413 m?
Parnitha
Parnitha, a national park at 1,413 m, is the highest of the mountains around Athens; a fire in June 2007 destroyed a large part of its fir forest.
Q 29Plaka, below the Acropolis, is described as what?
The oldest district of Athens
Plaka is the oldest district of Athens, built over ancient residential quarters and inhabited continuously since antiquity; within it, Anafiotika was built like a Cycladic village by 19th-century settlers from Anafi.
Q 30Which Athens suburb hosts the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, designed by Renzo Piano?
Kallithea
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, designed by Renzo Piano and opened in 2016 in Kallithea, south of the centre, houses the Greek National Opera and the National Library of Greece beneath a landscaped park.