Estonia
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48 free Estonia trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Estonia trivia quiz covers the northernmost Baltic state from its Viking-age raiders and the Danish conquest of Tallinn to Swedish rule, the 1918 declaration of independence, Soviet occupation, the Singing Revolution and the Baltic Way, and the digital republic that gave the world Skype, internet voting and e-residency. It also gets into the culture: the Song Festival, Arvo Pärt, Kalevipoeg, black bread and kama, kiiking, wife-carrying and a language closer to Finnish than to any of its neighbours. The first questions suit anyone who has walked Tallinn's Old Town; the last ones test people who know how high Estonia's highest hill is and what happened at the Kaali crater. Every question is multiple choice with a short explanation after you answer. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, and each question links to the page that confirms it.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Estonian belongs to which language family?
Finnic (Uralic)
Estonian is a Finnic language of the Uralic family; unlike Latvian and Lithuanian it is not Indo-European at all, and it has 14 noun cases.
Q 02Estonia restored its independence in August 1991 during which Moscow crisis?
A coup attempt
A coup attempt. Hardliners had moved against Gorbachev, and Soviet armoured columns were already moving on Tallinn when parliament voted; within three weeks the Soviet Union had recognised Estonia's independence.
Q 03The peaceful 1988-90 movement toward Estonian independence is known as what?
The Singing Revolution
The Singing Revolution. Under Soviet rule choirs had kept national feeling alive, singing 'My Fatherland Is My Love' in place of the banned anthem, and in 1988 mass singing turned into open protest.
Q 04What was the 1989 human chain of two million across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania called?
The Baltic Way
The Baltic Way. On 23 August 1989 about two million people joined hands in a line from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius, and Moscow answered within days with a furious rebuke.
Q 05The 1989 human chain through Estonia marked 50 years since which pact?
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Days before the anniversary a Soviet commission at last admitted that the pact's secret protocols, which had handed Estonia and its neighbours to Stalin, were real.
Q 06Which country's army marched into Tallinn a day after Estonia declared independence in 1918?
Germany
Germany. The declaration came in the brief gap between the Bolshevik retreat and the German arrival, and independence became real only after a war of more than a year against Bolshevik and local German forces alike.
Q 07In its 2005 local elections, Estonia became the first country to do what?
Allow binding internet voting nationwide
Allow binding internet voting nationwide. Voters logged in with their chip-bearing national ID cards during the advance-voting days, and anyone who preferred could still go to a polling station on election day.
Q 08Estonia's e-residency gives foreigners no right to live there; what does it let them do?
Run an Estonian company
Run an Estonian company. Holders get a state-issued digital identity for signing documents online from anywhere, a scheme aimed at entrepreneurs whose work is not tied to one place.
Q 09Which internet calling service, launched in 2003, was built by a team of Estonian programmers?
Skype
Skype. Its software was written in Estonia for two Scandinavian founders; Microsoft paid $8.5 billion for it in 2011 and retired the service in 2025.
Q 10Which currency did Estonia give up when it adopted the euro in 2011?
Kroon
Kroon. Estonians had swapped their Soviet roubles for it in June 1992, and its fixed peg to the Deutschmark soon brought runaway inflation down.
Q 11Estonia's flag is a horizontal tricolour of blue, white and which third colour?
Black
The third stripe is black: the blue-black-white tricolour was adopted by the Vironia student society in 1881, and the Soviet regime later banned it outright.
Q 12Estonia's highest point, Suur Munamägi, reaches roughly what height above sea level?
300 m
300 m. Suur Munamägi reaches just 318 metres, yet nothing in Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania stands higher, in a country so low-lying that its average elevation is about 50 metres.
Q 13Roughly how many islands and islets lie off the coast of Estonia?
2,000
2,000 is the round figure: published counts run from about 1,500 to more than 2,300, depending on how small a rock is allowed to count as an island.
Q 21Estonians who resisted the second Soviet occupation as guerrillas were known as what?
Forest Brothers
Forest Brothers. They fought on from the woods for years after 1944; one of the last, August Sabbe, was tracked down in 1978 by KGB agents posing as fishermen and drowned in a river as they closed in.
Q 22The 2007 relocation of which Soviet war memorial in Tallinn triggered riots and cyberattacks on Estonia?
The Bronze Soldier
The Bronze Soldier. Moving the memorial to a military cemetery set off riots in which one person died, then three weeks of cyberattacks on Estonian websites; a year later NATO opened a cyber-defence centre in Tallinn.
Q 23Kaja Kallas resigned as Estonia's prime minister in 2024 to take which international post?
Q 14The Kaali crater field on Saaremaa was formed by what?
A meteorite impact
A meteorite impact. The rock broke up in the air and struck an island that was already inhabited, a blast since likened to an atomic bomb; the largest of its nine craters is 110 m across.
Q 15The Estonian Song Festival, first held in 1869, takes place how often?
Every five years
Every five years. The first festival, at Tartu in 1869, drew fewer than 900 performers, all in men's choirs and brass bands; its modern successors have drawn about 100,000 performers and spectators at a time.
Q 16Which Estonian composer invented the minimalist tintinnabuli style?
Arvo Pärt
Arvo Pärt. He devised the bell-like style in 1976 with the piano piece Für Alina, and four years later he left Soviet Estonia for the West, where his music found its audience.
Q 17The University of Tartu, Estonia's oldest, was founded in 1632 by which king?
Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden
Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. He signed the founding decree in June 1632, months before he was killed in battle; later wars closed the university twice, the second time for almost a century.
Q 18Which kingdom won the 1219 Battle of Lyndanisse under Valdemar II at what is now Tallinn?
Denmark
Denmark. Valdemar II won at Lyndanisse on 15 June 1219, the day the Dannebrog flag is said to have fallen from the sky, and the Danes then held northern Estonia for more than a century.
Q 19By what name was Tallinn known to most of the world from the 13th to the early 20th century?
Reval
Reval. One overlord after another used the name for some seven centuries, and the Estonian name Tallinn became the official one only with independence in 1918.
Q 20Which Estonian city faces the Russian town of Ivangorod across a river?
Narva
Narva. The city was almost wiped out in 1944 and its former residents were kept from returning; Soviet-era settlers took their place, which is why it is overwhelmingly Russian-speaking today.
EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs
EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs. Earlier that year Russia had put her on its wanted list over the removal of Soviet war monuments in Estonia, a move she dismissed as a familiar scare tactic.
Q 24Kersti Kaljulaid, president from 2016 to 2021, was Estonia's first what?
Female head of state
Female head of state. She was working as an EU auditor when parliament, after five failed rounds of voting, turned to her as a joint candidate and elected her with 81 of its 101 votes.
Q 25Lennart Meri, president from 1992 to 2001, had earlier worked in which creative field?
Film-making and writing
Film-making and writing. He went into politics as independence neared and became president in 1992, although he had come second in the popular vote: the final choice fell to parliament, which preferred him.
Q 26Estonia's national epic, compiled by Friedrich Kreutzwald around 1860, is called what?
Kalevipoeg
Kalevipoeg. The name means 'Son of Kalev'; Kreutzwald wove scattered folk tales into verse about a mythical ruler of ancient Estonia, and the poem became a touchstone of the national awakening.
Q 27Kiiking, a sport invented in Estonia in the 1990s, involves doing what?
Swinging a full 360 degrees over a bar
Swinging a full 360 degrees over a bar. Inventor Ado Kosk gave the swing rigid steel arms and made them telescopic, because the longer the arms, the harder it is to get over the top.
Q 28The Estonian pronoun 'tema' does the work of which two English words?
He and she
He and she. Estonian has no grammatical gender and no articles either, though learners are not let off lightly: its nouns come in fourteen cases.
Q 29In 1994, following Milton Friedman's ideas, Estonia became one of the first countries to adopt what?
A flat income tax
A flat income tax. Prime minister Mart Laar later said the only economics book he had read was Friedman's Free to Choose, and that he had assumed its ideas were already normal practice in the West.
Q 30Which locally mined fossil fuel generated most of Estonia's electricity for decades?
Oil shale
Oil shale. It has fired Estonia's big power stations since the 1920s, but at a price: the plants long produced most of the country's air pollution, and mining has left hills of waste rock across the north-east.