Festivals Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
40 free Festivals trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Every culture has found a reason to close the streets. Some festivals are sacred: a pilgrimage measured in hundreds of millions of people, a new year spent in total stillness, relics paraded down to the river. Others are gloriously silly, with whole towns hurling fruit at each other or chasing a cheese down a hill. And a few changed music and cinema for good, from the night a singer went electric to the debut that a war cancelled after a single screening. These 40 questions travel across world, religious, music, food and film festivals: ice and snow carnivals in the far north, sun and harvest rites in the south, the great dance and rock gatherings of Europe and the Americas, and the juries and audience votes that decide which films get talked about. Every answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds something you did not know. Play it solo to see how far your passport knowledge stretches, or run it as a round at a quiz night and read the explanations aloud.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01At the Wodaabe people's Gerewol in Niger, who judges the line of painted, eye-rolling young men?
Marriageable women
Marriageable women pick the winners of this week-long courtship contest, where the male beauty ideal prizes tallness, white eyes and white teeth.
Q 02Cannes's first film festival managed only an opening-night gala before being called off because of what?
Germany's invasion of Poland
Germany's invasion of Poland stopped the 1939 festival, and the first complete Cannes festival had to wait until after the war, in 1946.
Q 03At which 1967 festival did Jimi Hendrix set his guitar alight on stage?
Monterey Pop
Monterey Pop was the Jimi Hendrix Experience's first major American show, and the set there made Hendrix famous in the US.
Q 04Which Deep Purple song recalls a night at the Montreux Jazz Festival's casino during a Frank Zappa gig?
Smoke on the Water
Smoke on the Water tells how a fan fired a flare gun into the casino's ceiling during the concert, and the fire destroyed the whole building.
Q 05Which New Mexico city fills its October dawns with mass ascensions of 500-plus hot-air balloons?
Albuquerque
Albuquerque's Balloon Fiesta is the largest in the world and is billed as the most photographed annual event anywhere; it began in 1972 with just 13 balloons.
Q 06Ganesh Chaturthi's ten days end with the elephant-headed god's clay idols paraded off to what fate?
Immersion
Immersion has a cost: in 2004 the Madras High Court briefly banned it because the chemicals in the idols pollute the sea.
Q 07Which cheese do runners chase down Cooper's Hill near Brockworth?
Double Gloucester
Double Gloucester's race drew such crowds that safety fears got the official event cancelled in 2010, and rebel cheese rollers ran their own anyway.
Q 08Which actor was the main founder of the institute that runs the Sundance Film Festival?
Robert Redford
Robert Redford's institute runs a festival that began in 1978 as the Utah/US Film Festival and only took the name Sundance in 1991.
Q 09Which film festival did Robert De Niro co-found in 2002 to revive Lower Manhattan after 9/11?
Tribeca
Tribeca has since widened from film into TV, music, games and immersive work, and in 2021 it dropped 'Film' from its name.
Q 10Which prize goes to the best film at the world's oldest film festival, founded in Venice in 1932?
Golden Lion
The Golden Lion only arrived in 1949: from 1934 to 1942 the festival's top prize had been the Mussolini Cup.
Q 11Lollapalooza was conceived in 1991 by singer Perry Farrell as a farewell tour for which band?
Jane's Addiction
Jane's Addiction's farewell tour never really ended: Lollapalooza ran until 1997, came back in 2003 and settled for good in Chicago's Grant Park in 2005.
Q 12Bob Dylan was booed by some fans in 1965 when he plugged in an electric band at which festival?
Newport Folk
At Newport Folk, Pete Seeger later said he wished he had an axe to cut the cables, the electric sound was so loud and distorted.
Q 13South by Southwest, where Twitter first found buzz in 2007, fills which Texas city each March?
Austin
Austin's SXSW was Twitter's tipping point: during the 2007 festival, tweets rose from 20,000 a day to 60,000.
Q 21Which composer's operas alone fill the Bayreuth Festival, in a theatre he supervised building?
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner could not raise enough money to finish the theatre until King Ludwig II of Bavaria put up the funds, so the first festival opened only in 1876.
Q 22Which UK music festival takes place on Worthy Farm?
Glastonbury
Glastonbury skips a year every so often, a 'fallow year' that gives Worthy Farm's land and cows a rest.
Q 23Yi Peng, held in northern Thailand alongside Loy Krathong, fills the night sky with swarms of what?
Paper lanterns
After a big Yi Peng release of paper lanterns, workers are hired to gather those that fall, and villagers are paid for each one they bring back.
Q 14Bonnaroo, the June festival held on a 700-acre farm in Manchester, is in which US state?
Tennessee
Tennessee's Bonnaroo lost two years in a row: COVID-19 cancelled it in 2020, and Hurricane Ida's rain flooded the farm in 2021.
Q 15Ultra, the dance festival named after a Depeche Mode album, grew worldwide from which Florida city?
Miami
Miami's city commission pushed Ultra out of Bayfront Park, and after a 2019 stint on Virginia Key it offered the festival a way back.
Q 16Tomorrowland, the dance festival held in the town of Boom, is in which country?
Belgium
Belgium's Tomorrowland began in 2005 as a one-day event run by brothers Manu and Michiel Beers, long before it grew to two weekends.
Q 17The first Fuji Rock Festival, held at the foot of Mount Fuji in 1997, lost its second day to what?
A typhoon
A typhoon hit Fuji Rock's first day, many poorly prepared fans suffered in the cold, and organisers called off day two.
Q 18Which Japanese city's Snow Festival began in 1950 with six statues built by high-school students?
Sapporo
Sapporo's statues turned into giant sculptures in 1955, when soldiers from Japan's Self-Defense Forces joined in to build them.
Q 19Vesak, marking the Buddha's birth, enlightenment and death on one day, follows which lunar phase?
Full moon
The full moon of the lunar month of Vesakha fixes the date, so Vesak moves between April, May and June from one year to the next.
Q 20Sweden's Midsummer, a family celebration of the brightest days, centres on dancing around what?
A maypole
A maypole is the heart of Swedish Midsummer, where families circle it doing Små grodorna, the 'little frogs' dance that mimes the ears and tails frogs lack.
Q 24Which Japanese city's Gion Matsuri, born of a ninth-century plague, parades tall floats in July?
Kyoto
Kyoto's Gion Matsuri began in 869 with 66 halberds, one for each province, raised in prayers to end the plague.
Q 25Which Hindu pilgrimage rotates among four Indian cities and is called the largest human gathering on Earth?
Kumbh Mela
Kumbh Mela takes turns at Prayagraj, Haridwar, Nashik and Ujjain, and pilgrims bathe in sacred rivers, at Prayagraj where the Ganges and Yamuna meet.
Q 26Onam, with its snake-boat races and flower carpets, is the harvest festival of which Indian state?
Kerala
Kerala's Onam welcomes home the legendary king Mahabali, whom the dwarf Vamana tricked by asking for just three steps of land.
Q 27The National Eisteddfod of Wales awards its top prizes, the Chair and the Crown, for which art?
Poetry
Poetry takes both, and in 1917 the Chair went to the poet Hedd Wyn, who had been killed at Passchendaele weeks before the ceremony.
Q 28Which film festival gives an audience-voted People's Choice Award?
Toronto
Toronto's People's Choice winners include Chariots of Fire and American Beauty, which both went on to win the Best Picture Oscar.
Q 29Which Nordic country's Roskilde Festival was started in 1971 by two high-school students and a promoter?
Denmark
Denmark's Roskilde ran short of money in its first year, the students paid the bills, and a non-profit foundation took the festival over for 1972.
Q 30Alba's autumn fair in Piedmont, where buyers pay thousands of dollars a kilo, sells which delicacy?
Truffles
Truffles are hunted with trained dogs, which, unlike the pigs once used, have no urge to eat what they find.