Cathedrals
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50 free Cathedrals trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Cathedrals are some of the most ambitious things people have ever built. Many took centuries to finish, a few never were, and almost every one has a story about a fire, a coronation, a collapse or a stubborn architect attached to it. This cathedral quiz covers the famous names of Europe along with great churches on other continents. Expect questions on who designed what, which rulers were crowned or buried where, the terms that describe a Gothic church from floor plan to roofline, and the strange details that guides love to point out. It is written for curious travellers, architecture fans and pub quiz regulars alike. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave knowing more than when you started.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which French ruler placed the crown on his own head at Notre-Dame de Paris in 1804 as Pope Pius VII looked on?
Napoleon I
Napoleon I took off his laurel wreath and crowned himself, then crowned the kneeling Josephine, while the pope who had come to Paris to officiate recited a Latin formula.
Q 02Which architect is buried in the crypt of Barcelona's Sagrada Família, the church he worked on from 1883 until he died?
Antoni Gaudí
Antoni Gaudí rests in a church that was never a cathedral, despite its nickname: Barcelona's archbishop has his seat at the older Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia.
Q 03Which Archbishop of Canterbury was killed inside his own cathedral in 1170 by four knights loyal to King Henry II?
Thomas Becket
Thomas Becket was made a saint little more than two years after the killing, and his jewelled shrine drew pilgrims to Canterbury until Henry VIII had it destroyed in 1538.
Q 04A cathedral takes its name from the cathedra kept inside, which is what kind of object reserved for the local bishop?
A throne
A throne for the bishop is what a cathedra is: the word comes from the Greek for seat, and it is also the distant source of the English word chair.
Q 05In which London church did Prince Charles marry Lady Diana Spencer in 1981 before an estimated 750 million TV viewers?
St Paul's Cathedral
St Paul's Cathedral won out over the traditional royal wedding venue because it offered more seating and allowed a longer procession through London.
Q 06The Leaning Tower of Pisa was built from 1173 to serve what purpose for the cathedral standing beside it?
Housing its bells
Housing its bells is all the famous landmark was built for: it is a campanile holding seven of them, and it began to lean during construction because the soft ground could not bear its weight.
Q 07Which domed Istanbul landmark, completed in 537, was the cathedral of Constantinople before becoming a mosque in 1453?
Hagia Sophia
Hagia Sophia remained the largest church in the world for more than 500 years, until the abbey church at Cluny in France was completed in the 12th century.
Q 08Which ruler ordered Saint Basil's Cathedral built on Moscow's Red Square to mark the capture of Kazan and Astrakhan?
Ivan the Terrible
Ivan the Terrible had it built between 1555 and 1561, and its nine onion domes, each topping a separate church, are shaped to suggest the flame of a bonfire rising into the sky.
Q 09Which novelist's 1817 gravestone in Winchester Cathedral praises her mind but never says that she wrote books?
Jane Austen
Jane Austen was buried there because her brother Henry had clerical connections, and the epitaph, composed by another brother, dwells on her character and her faith.
Q 10Which arched outer support, used at Notre-Dame de Paris around 1180, let Gothic builders fill walls with stained glass?
Flying buttress
Flying buttress arches carry the outward push of a stone vault across open space to a massive pier, so the wall itself no longer has to be thick enough to resist it.
Q 11Which architect was put in charge of rebuilding 52 City of London churches after the Great Fire of 1666?
Christopher Wren
Christopher Wren lies beneath his own domed masterpiece, where a Latin epitaph tells any reader seeking his monument simply to look around.
Q 12Which German city's twin-spired cathedral, begun in 1248 to hold relics of the Three Kings, was only completed in 1880?
Cologne
Cologne celebrated the completion as a national event 632 years after work began, and at 157 metres the cathedral was the tallest building in the world for the next four years.
Q 13Which novelist's 1831 story of a hunchback stirred the interest that led to the restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris?
Victor Hugo
Q 21Which Renaissance architect engineered the brick dome of Florence Cathedral without a temporary wooden supporting frame?
Filippo Brunelleschi
Filippo Brunelleschi laid the bricks in a herringbone pattern to hold them while the mortar set, and his dome, finished by 1436, remains the largest masonry dome ever built.
Q 22Which Impressionist painted the facade of Rouen Cathedral more than thirty times to capture it in changing light?
Claude Monet
Claude Monet rented rooms across the street as a temporary studio in 1892 and 1893, then chose the twenty canvases he thought best for an 1895 exhibition in Paris.
Q 23Giles Gilbert Scott, designer of the red telephone box, was 22 when he won the contest to design which city's cathedral?
Victor Hugo wrote the novel partly to save the neglected cathedral he admired, and the restoration it inspired ran from 1844 to 1864.
Q 14Which Italian city's cathedral, topped by a statue known as the Madonnina, took nearly six centuries to complete?
Milan
Milan began building in 1386 and finished the last details in 1965, and locals call it a fair-weather day when the Madonnina can be seen from a distance through the mist.
Q 15Which name is given to the great circular stained-glass openings, divided by stone tracery, in Gothic cathedral facades?
Rose window
Rose window designs are also known as Catherine windows, after Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who was sentenced to die on a spiked breaking wheel.
Q 16Westminster Abbey is no cathedral: since 1560 the coronation church has answered directly to whom, bypassing any bishop?
The monarch
The monarch has overseen Westminster Abbey directly since Elizabeth I made it a royal peculiar; it had served as a cathedral only briefly, in the 1540s and 1550s.
Q 17Which Soviet leader chose the site of Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, dynamited in 1931, for a vast palace?
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin's Palace of the Soviets was never built: the flooded foundation pit became the world's largest open-air swimming pool in 1958, and a new cathedral was built on the site in the 1990s.
Q 18Which composer married Constanze Weber at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna in 1782 and had his funeral there in 1791?
Mozart
Mozart had also been appointed an adjunct music director at the cathedral shortly before his death, and Vivaldi's funeral had been held there fifty years earlier.
Q 19Which Italian city's cathedral holds a famous linen burial shroud that the Dukes of Savoy brought there in 1578?
Turin
Turin has kept the cloth ever since, although radiocarbon tests by three independent laboratories in 1988 dated the linen to the Middle Ages, between 1260 and 1390.
Q 20Which capital's cathedral stands on a former Aztec sacred precinct and keeps sinking into an old lakebed?
Mexico City
Mexico City's cathedral took from 1573 to 1813 to build, and its uneven sinking once put it on a list of the world's 100 most endangered sites before engineers stabilised it.
Liverpool
Liverpool picked his design although he had no existing buildings to his credit, and the cathedral, built between 1904 and 1978, is the longest in the world.
Q 24Which English city kept the bombed shell of its old cathedral as a memorial beside a new one consecrated in 1962?
Coventry
Coventry's architect insisted the ruin be kept as a garden of remembrance, and the cross on the new high altar holds three medieval roof nails salvaged from the rubble.
Q 25St. Louis Cathedral, among the oldest in continuous use in the United States, faces Jackson Square in which city?
New Orleans
New Orleans has had a church on the site since the city was founded in 1718, and the cathedral is dedicated to Saint Louis, better known as King Louis IX of France.
Q 26Which English city's Norman cathedral holds Saint Cuthbert's shrine and appeared in the first two Harry Potter films?
Durham
Durham's cathedral also holds the remains of the Venerable Bede, and UNESCO calls it the largest and most perfect monument of Norman architecture in England.
Q 27The Camino pilgrimage route across northern Spain ends at a cathedral reputed to hold the remains of which apostle?
Saint James
Saint James is said to lie in Santiago de Compostela Cathedral, which swings the Botafumeiro, the largest censer in the world, almost to the transept roof at speeds of up to 80 km/h.
Q 28Which Spanish city's Gothic cathedral holds the tomb of Columbus and reuses a mosque's minaret, the Giralda?
Seville
Seville's cathedral chapter is said to have vowed to build a church so grand that those who saw it finished would take them for mad, and it became the largest Gothic cathedral in the world.
Q 29Which film villain's head was carved high on Washington National Cathedral after a public competition for new designs?
Darth Vader
Darth Vader glares down from high on the north-west side, and inside a fragment of lunar rock is sealed into stained glass honouring the Moon landing.
Q 30The Italian word duomo, used for the great churches of Florence and Siena, comes from a Latin word meaning what?
House
House is the meaning: duomo comes from the Latin domus, so the name says nothing about a roof, and a duomo needs no dome to earn it.