Austria Trivia
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57 free Austria trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Austria is a small Alpine republic that used to run an empire, and both halves of that story are in this quiz. The history questions cover the Ostarrîchi document of 996, the Babenbergs and Habsburgs, the sieges of Vienna, Maria Theresa, Franz Joseph and Sisi, the 1867 Compromise, the shot at Sarajevo, the First Republic, Dollfuss, the Anschluss of 1938, the State Treaty and neutrality of 1955, Waldheim, Haider, Kurz and the Ibiza affair. The rest is the Austria people visit: nine states and a capital that is also a state, the Grossglockner and the Danube, Hallstatt and the Wachau, Salzburg and Mozart, Vienna's coffee houses, the New Year's Concert, the Spanish Riding School, the Riesenrad of The Third Man, schnitzel, Sachertorte and Kaiserschmarrn, Grüner Veltliner, Red Bull and Swarovski, Freud, Klimt, Schrödinger and Wittgenstein, Falco and Conchita Wurst, Niki Lauda, Marcel Hirscher and the Sound of Music. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Austria, its cities, rulers, artists and brands, so the dates and figures are reliable.
30 of 57 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Ostarrîchi, the name of Austria first recorded in 996, was the eastern frontier march of which duchy?
Bavaria
Bavaria lost the march in 1156, when Emperor Barbarossa made Austria a duchy of its own to compensate its margrave for giving up Bavaria itself.
Q 02Which tiny European country is one of Austria's eight neighbors?
Liechtenstein
Liechtenstein's princes long ruled it from afar; Franz Joseph II, who succeeded in 1938, was the first to make the country his main home.
Q 03Which is Austria's highest mountain?
Grossglockner
Grossglockner's High Alpine Road was revived during the Depression to create jobs for thousands of unemployed Austrians, and opened in 1935.
Q 04Which Austrian ski town hosts the Hahnenkamm races on its steep Streif course?
Kitzbühel
Kitzbühel honors every Hahnenkamm downhill winner by putting their name on a cabin of the gondola that climbs the mountain.
Q 05Which Celtic-era culture, named after an Austrian salt-mining village, left Europe's oldest Celtic evidence?
Hallstatt
The village's salt mine is described as the world's oldest still working.
Q 06Which Roman province, named after a Celtic kingdom, covered most of modern Austria?
Noricum
Noricum's iron fed Rome's armies: its especially hard Noric steel was used above all to make Roman weapons.
Q 07Rudolph I's 1278 victory at Dürnkrut over Ottokar II of Bohemia began which dynasty's rule in Austria?
The Habsburgs
The Habsburgs won when Ottokar was killed in the rout, and the family went on to rule Austria until 1918.
Q 08Whom did Emperor Maximilian I's son, Philip the Fair, marry in 1496?
Joanna the Mad
Joanna the Mad was not expected to inherit, but the deaths of her brother, sister and nephew made her heir to both Castile and Aragon.
Q 09Which Polish king commanded the army that relieved the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683?
John III Sobieski
John III Sobieski's victory cost the losing grand vizier, Kara Mustafa, his life: the sultan had him strangled in Belgrade that Christmas.
Q 10Which Prussian king seized Silesia from Maria Theresa?
Frederick the Great
Frederick the Great invaded in December 1740; Austria fought two more wars over Silesia, but the 1763 peace left it Prussian.
Q 11Emperor Francis I of Austria married his daughter Marie Louise to which ruler?
Napoleon Bonaparte
Napoleon Bonaparte had set aside Josephine because their marriage produced no heir; Marie Louise bore him a son, styled King of Rome, in 1811.
Q 12Defeat by Prussia at which 1866 battle shut Austria out of German unification?
Königgrätz
Königgrätz was a triumph for Prussia's breech-loading needle gun, which Austrian advance troops had already learned to fear in earlier clashes.
Q 13The Ausgleich of 1867 created dual sovereignty between Austria and which kingdom under Franz Joseph I?
Hungary
Hungary won its own parliament and government, sharing the monarch, foreign policy and army; defeat by Prussia in 1866 had forced Franz Joseph to make the deal.
Q 21Which former UN Secretary-General became Austrian president in 1986 amid a Wehrmacht controversy?
Kurt Waldheim
Kurt Waldheim was put on a US watch list in 1987 over his wartime record, barring him from entering the United States as a private person while president.
Q 22Austria joined the European Union in 1995 alongside which two countries?
Sweden and Finland
Sweden and Finland joined with Austria; Norway had negotiated to join too, but stayed out after its 1994 referendum.
Q 23Sebastian Kurz's first coalition collapsed in 2019 over a corruption scandal named after which island?
Ibiza
Ibiza was where FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache was secretly filmed offering government contracts to a woman posing as a Russian oligarch's niece.
Q 14Empress Elisabeth, 'Sisi', was fatally stabbed in 1898 in which city?
Geneva
In Geneva, anarchist Luigi Lucheni stabbed her with a sharpened needle file; the wound was so small that she walked on and boarded her steamer before collapsing.
Q 15Whose assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 led Vienna to declare war on Serbia?
Archduke Franz Ferdinand
Archduke Franz Ferdinand survived a bomb that morning, but his driver, never told of a route change, turned wrong and stopped to reverse right beside gunman Gavrilo Princip.
Q 16What did Austria's 1919 peace treaty with the Allies forbid for the new republic?
Union with Germany
Union with Germany was exactly what the new state wanted: its 1918 provisional constitution called German-Austria part of the German republic, and the treaty banned that name too.
Q 17Which Austrian chancellor built an Austrofascist dictatorship and was killed in a 1934 Nazi coup attempt?
Engelbert Dollfuss
Engelbert Dollfuss was shot when SS men disguised as Austrian soldiers and police stormed the Chancellery, though the rest of his government escaped.
Q 18Which Austrian chancellor resigned in 1938 after Hitler made him cancel an independence referendum?
Kurt Schuschnigg
Kurt Schuschnigg was then arrested and held by the Nazis until 1945, latterly in concentration camps, and later became a professor in the United States.
Q 19Adolf Hitler was born in 1889 in which Austrian town near the German border?
Braunau am Inn
Braunau am Inn's house where he was born has been converted into a police station, a choice that has drawn mixed feelings in the town.
Q 20Austria's 1955 declaration of permanent neutrality was modeled on which country's?
Switzerland
Switzerland's style of neutrality was Moscow's price: the Soviets agreed to withdraw their occupying troops only after Austria promised to stay neutral.
Q 24Which organization, founded in Baghdad in 1960, has its headquarters in Vienna?
OPEC
OPEC's Vienna conference was stormed in 1975 by gunmen led by Carlos the Jackal, who took its oil ministers hostage and flew many of them to North Africa.
Q 25What did the Romans call the castrum they founded on the site of Vienna in the 1st century?
Vindobona
Vindobona's south-western wall ran along today's Graben, a central Vienna street named for the ditch that lay in front of it.
Q 26Which English king did Austria's Duke Leopold V imprison?
Richard I
Richard I's ransom was so vast that Leopold's share paid for Vienna's mint and new city walls and helped found Wiener Neustadt.
Q 27The Austrian schilling, introduced in 1925 to replace the Krone, earned what nickname for its stability?
The Alpine dollar
The Alpine dollar followed ruinous post-war inflation: the schilling replaced the Krone at 10,000 to one, after a League of Nations loan steadied Austria's finances.
Q 28Besides German, which language is official in parts of Carinthia?
Slovene
Slovene place names were long the flashpoint: how many southern Carinthian villages had to post bilingual Slovene–German signs became a bitter dispute that escalated in the 1970s.
Q 29Which composer died in Vienna at just 35?
Mozart
Mozart died with his Requiem unfinished; his widow had pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr complete it so the commission could be delivered.
Q 30Which composer wrote the tune of Austria's old imperial anthem, which Germany's national anthem uses?
Haydn
Haydn's melody was dropped after World War II because Germany's anthem, also used under the Nazis, had the same tune; Austria adopted a new anthem in 1946.