Azerbaijan Trivia
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59 free Azerbaijan trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Azerbaijan is a country most people can place on a map only vaguely, which is exactly what makes it good trivia. It sits where Europe meets Asia on the shore of the Caspian Sea, its capital Baku is the lowest-lying national capital on Earth, and it has more mud volcanoes than anywhere else on the planet. Add a natural gas hillside that has burned for decades, a fire temple, a 12th-century tower on the banknotes and the world's first oil tanker, and you have a lot to ask about. This quiz runs through geography, history, culture, food and sport: the treaties that split the Azerbaijanis between Russia and Iran, the 23-month republic that gave Muslim women the vote in 1918, the Nobel brothers and the Baku oil boom, mugham and the Eurovision win, plov and armudu tea glasses, the Karabakh horse, Qarabag FK and the Formula One street race. Questions range from easy (what sea does it border?) to genuinely hard (which treaty fixed the Aras as the border?). Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and other reference pages before publishing, so you can trust what you learn here.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which country, the world's largest with no ocean coast, lies north-east of Azerbaijan across the Caspian?
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan lies across the water and shares no land border with Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan counts as landlocked too, despite its long shore, because the Caspian is in effect a lake: the largest inland body of water on Earth.
Q 02Which medieval traveller described an oil spring, usually taken to be near Baku, that could fill a hundred ships?
Marco Polo
Marco Polo called the oil no good to eat but good to burn, and wrote that people came from vast distances to fetch it, because the countries all around had no other oil.
Q 03Only two national capitals lie below sea level: Baku, the lowest of all, and which European city?
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the only other one, and Baku lies far lower: the Caspian on whose shore it stands is an inland lake, and its surface sits more than 25 metres beneath the level of the oceans.
Q 04The khazri from the north and the gilavar from the south give Baku which nickname?
City of Winds
City of Winds: the khazri is cold and the gilavar warm, and between them they blow all year. The name Baku itself is popularly traced to an old phrase meaning wind-pounded.
Q 05Yanar Dag, a hillside near Baku that has burned continuously for decades, is fed by what?
A natural gas seep
A natural gas seep feeds the flames through the porous hillside; guides say it has burned for 4,000 years, though other accounts hold it was only set alight in the 1950s.
Q 06Azerbaijan's long-standing nickname is the Land of what?
Fire
Fire is the word the country sells itself with: 'Azerbaijan, Land of Fire' ran across Atlético Madrid's shirts in the season the club won La Liga and reached the Champions League final.
Q 07Which conqueror reinstated the satrap Atropates, Azerbaijan's likely namesake?
Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great reinstated Atropates as satrap of Media after first replacing him; when Alexander died, Atropates refused to obey his generals and made the province his own kingdom, Atropatene.
Q 08Which two treaties, in 1813 and 1828, forced Qajar Iran to cede its Caucasian territories to Russia?
Gulistan and Turkmenchay
Gulistan and Turkmenchay ended two wars that Iran lost, and the new frontier cut the Azerbaijani people in two, a split that still runs between the Republic of Azerbaijan and Iran.
Q 09Which river became the border between Russia and Iran after the 1828 treaty?
Aras
The Aras still marks the line, and it left a people divided: more Azerbaijanis now live south of it, in Iran, than in the Republic of Azerbaijan itself.
Q 10The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic of 1918 was the first Muslim-majority state to do what?
Grant women equal voting rights with men
Grant women equal voting rights with men: the 1918 republic did it two years before the United States, and a decade before Britain let women vote on the same terms as men.
Q 11Whose invasion in April 1920 ended the independent Azerbaijan Democratic Republic after just 23 months?
The Red Army
The Red Army crossed the border on 27 April 1920 as Baku's Bolsheviks handed parliament an ultimatum; the deputies voted to give up power rather than see blood shed in the capital.
Q 12Germany's 1942 plan to seize Baku's oil fields was code-named after which flower?
Edelweiss
Edelweiss, the Alpine flower, named the drive over the Caucasus; Baku's capture was fixed for 25 September 1942 and Hitler's generals gave him a cake of the Caspian, but the army never got there.
Q 13Which Swedish industrial family arrived as investors in Baku's oil fields in 1873?
The Nobels
Q 21Mount Bazardüzü, Azerbaijan's highest peak at 4,466 m, sits on the border with which country?
Russia's Dagestan
It is also the highest point of Dagestan, and Russia's southernmost point lies a few kilometres away.
Q 22Which is the longest river in Azerbaijan, entering the country from Georgia?
Kura
The Kura rises in Turkey and runs through Tbilisi before crossing Azerbaijan, where dams built for power and irrigation have slowed it and created the vast Mingachevir reservoir.
Q 23Which endangered animal, known for its speed and golden coat, is the national animal of Azerbaijan?
The Karabakh horse
The Karabakh horse, a mountain breed named for the region that raised it, is down to fewer than 1,000 animals, and the state now runs stud farms to keep it from dying out.
The Nobels built Branobel into one of the world's largest oil firms, and about 12 percent of the fortune Alfred Nobel left to fund the Nobel Prizes came from his shares in it.
Q 14Baku's seafront museum of which craft is built to look like its own exhibit, rolled up?
Carpets
Carpets run through family life here: special ones were woven for weddings, births and mourning, and since 2014 the museum has sat in a building shaped like a rolled rug.
Q 15Which region, long home to an ethnic Armenian majority, was at the centre of two wars between Azerbaijan and Armenia?
Nagorno-Karabakh
Nagorno-Karabakh was run by its Armenians for three decades; Azerbaijan retook it in 2020 and 2023, and within weeks more than 100,000 of its roughly 120,000 Armenians had left.
Q 16Before he ran Soviet Azerbaijan, Heydar Aliyev headed the republic's branch of which Soviet organisation?
The KGB
The KGB made his name: he became head of its Azerbaijani branch in 1967, took over the whole republic two years later, and in 1982 was promoted to the Soviet Politburo in Moscow.
Q 17Ilham Aliyev, who became Azerbaijan's president in 2003, is what relation to his predecessor Heydar Aliyev?
His son
His son: the ailing Heydar made Ilham prime minister in August 2003, two months before the election, and in 2017 Ilham appointed his own wife, Mehriban, as vice-president.
Q 18Nakhchivan, an autonomous republic of Azerbaijan, is unusual because it is what?
An exclave cut off by Armenia
An exclave cut off by Armenia, Nakhchivan still shaped the whole country: Heydar Aliyev was by official account born there, retreated there after Moscow dropped him, and came back from it to take power in 1993.
Q 19Which biblical figure is linked by folk etymology to the name Nakhchivan, "place of the first descent"?
Noah
Noah, the story goes, settled there after the Ark came to rest on nearby Mount Ararat, and the city still shows visitors a tomb it calls his; scholars treat the link as folklore rather than the name's real root.
Q 20Azerbaijan's shortest land border, only about ten miles long, is with which country?
Turkey
Turkey touches Azerbaijan only along that short riverside strip, yet the two are so close that Heydar Aliyev's phrase for them, 'one nation, two states', became the motto of the alliance.
Q 24On Azerbaijan's flag, red stands for progress and green for Islam; what does the blue stand for?
Turkic identity
Turkic identity: the three stripes answer an early nationalist slogan, 'Turkify, Islamize, Europeanize', so blue marks Turkic roots, green the faith and red the push to modernise.
Q 25Azerbaijan's first flag, in 1918, was modelled on the red banner of which empire?
Ottoman
The Ottoman Empire: the 1918 flag was a white crescent and eight-pointed star on red, the old Ottoman pattern; within months the republic swapped it for the tricolour but kept the crescent and star.
Q 26The 1937 novel 'Ali and Nino' follows a Muslim Azerbaijani boy in Baku who loves a Christian girl from which country?
Georgia
Georgia: Nino is a Georgian princess, and the love story came to be seen as Azerbaijan's national novel even though its author hid behind the pen name Kurban Said.
Q 27Since independence in 1991, Azerbaijani in the Republic has been written in which script?
Latin
Latin: the third switch in a century; Arabic script gave way to Latin in 1929, Stalin ordered Cyrillic in 1939, and independence reversed him, while Azerbaijanis in Iran kept the Arabic script throughout.
Q 28Which is the flagship dish of Azerbaijani cuisine, made to dozens of regional recipes?
Saffron-rice plov
Saffron-rice plov is traditionally served in parts, unlike its Uzbek cousin: the rice is cooked alone and brought on its own platter, with the meat, dried fruit and herbs on others.
Q 29Azerbaijanis drink black tea from a narrow-waisted glass called an armudu, a name meaning what?
Pear-shaped
Pear-shaped: armud is the word for pear, and the pinched waist has a job, keeping the tea below it hot while the wider top cools enough to sip and to hold.
Q 30Narsharab, the tart sauce served with grilled sturgeon in Azerbaijan, is made from which fruit?
Pomegranate
Pomegranate juice is slowly boiled down until it is thick and sour, then poured over fish and grilled meat, and the town of Goychay throws a festival for the fruit every year.