Latvia Trivia
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49 free Latvia trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Latvia has one of the oldest flags in the world, a capital that is a third Art Nouveau, a song festival that has run since 1873, a midsummer night when the whole country heads for the countryside, and a black herbal liqueur whose recipe is known to three people. It also spent most of the last century fighting for, losing and regaining its independence, and joined a 675-km human chain to do it. This Latvia trivia quiz covers all of it. Forty-five questions run from geography (Riga, the Daugava and Gauja, Gaiziņkalns, the Gulf of Riga, the four regions, the forests) through history (the Baltic tribes, Bishop Albert, the Hansa, Livonia, the Duchy of Courland and its colonies, Swedish and Russian rule, 18 November 1918, Ulmanis, the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, deportations, the Singing Revolution and Baltic Way, 1991, NATO and the euro) to culture and sport (the flag, the Freedom Monument, the Song and Dance Festival, Jāņi, rupjmaize, Black Balsam, Baryshnikov, ice hockey, Porziņģis, Štrombergs). Roughly a third are easy, a third medium, and the rest are for people who really know the Baltics. Every answer has been checked against encyclopaedia and official pages, so the dates, numbers and names are ones you can rely on.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Latvian's closest living relative is the language of which country?
Lithuania
Lithuania. Latvian and Lithuanian are the only two Baltic languages still in official use; the rest, Old Prussian among them, died out as their speakers were absorbed by neighbouring peoples.
Q 02Which country borders Latvia to the north?
Estonia
Estonia. The border even splits a town: Valga in Estonia and Valka in Latvia were a single settlement until 1920 and now promote themselves together as one town in two countries.
Q 03Medieval Riga joined which league of cities?
Hanseatic League
Hanseatic League. Riga, founded by a German bishop in 1201, stood on a river trade route to the east, and Cēsis, Limbaži, Koknese and Valmiera later followed it into the league.
Q 04Which river flows through Latvia's capital on its way to the sea?
Daugava
Daugava. Known upstream as the Western Dvina, it rises in Russia's Valdai Hills and crosses Belarus before reaching Latvia, where hydroelectric dams harness its flow.
Q 05Europe's widest waterfall, the Venta Rapid, lies in which Latvian town?
Kuldīga
Kuldīga. The ledge is only about two metres high, and in spring fish leap up it, which is why the town was once known as the place where salmon are caught in the air.
Q 06What is Latvia's highest point, at just 312 m?
Gaiziņkalns
Gaiziņkalns. An observation tower built on the summit in the 1980s was never safe enough to open, drew visitors anyway, and was finally blown up in December 2012.
Q 07Which Latvian seaside resort near Riga is famed for its long white-sand beach?
Jūrmala
Jūrmala. The name is simply the Latvian word for seaside, and its pine air, mineral springs and curative mud made the town a spa resort as well as a beach one.
Q 08Latvia's constitution names four historical regions: Courland, Latgale, Zemgale and which other?
Vidzeme
Vidzeme. It is the region that takes in Riga, and a 2021 law on historical lands now recognises a fifth, Selonia, alongside the constitution's four.
Q 09The name Latvija derives from which ancient Baltic tribe?
Latgalians
Latgalians. Theirs was one of four Baltic tribes that merged into the Latvian people, and their name also survives in Latgale, the country's eastern region.
Q 10The ancient Balts traded which local product as far as Rome and the Mediterranean?
Amber
Amber. The fossil resin gathered on the Baltic shore was nicknamed the gold of the north, and the overland route that carried it south for thousands of years is still called the Amber Road.
Q 11The crusader state founded in medieval Latvia was formally called Terra Mariana, but is better known as what?
Livonia
Livonia. Terra Mariana means 'Land of Mary', the name German crusaders gave the pagan country after conquering and forcibly baptising it in the thirteenth century.
Q 12The Duchy of Courland founded 17th-century colonies in the Gambia and on which Caribbean island?
Tobago
Tobago. Duke Jacob's Courlanders planted a colony there in the 1650s but could not hold it, and the island's Great Courland Bay still carries the little duchy's name.
Q 13Which kingdom captured Riga in 1621 and ruled it for almost a century as one of its largest cities?
Sweden
Sweden. Its kings took the peasants' side against the local barons and brought in elementary schooling, and they held the city until Peter the Great took it in 1710.
Q 21The peaceful movement that led to Baltic independence from 1987 is known as what?
The Singing Revolution
The Singing Revolution. Tens of thousands gathered at festivals and rallies to sing national and folk songs as an act of resistance, and by 1991 all three countries were independent again.
Q 22The 1989 Baltic Way human chain linked Tallinn and Riga with which third capital?
Vilnius
Vilnius. About two million people joined hands along 675 km of road on 23 August 1989, fifty years to the day after the secret deal that cost all three countries their independence.
Q 23Latvia declared full independence on 21 August 1991, as a coup in Moscow against which Soviet leader collapsed?
Gorbachev
Q 14Russia annexed Courland in 1795 as which kingdom was wiped off the map?
Poland
Poland. Courland was a fief of the old Polish commonwealth, so when the Third Partition erased that state the duchy passed to Catherine the Great's empire.
Q 15Latvia declared independence on 18 November, days after which war ended?
World War I
World War I. The republic was proclaimed a week after the armistice, but it took almost two more years of fighting before Moscow signed away its claim to the country.
Q 16Who staged a bloodless coup in 1934 and ruled Latvia as dictator until 1940?
Kārlis Ulmanis
Kārlis Ulmanis. He had been the republic's first prime minister in 1918, and when the Soviets took over in 1940 they arrested and deported him; he died in Soviet custody two years later.
Q 17The secret protocol of which 1939 agreement assigned Latvia to the Soviet sphere of influence?
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Within weeks Moscow forced Latvia to accept Red Army bases on its soil, and the following summer it occupied and annexed the country outright.
Q 18In June 1941, days before Germany invaded, the Soviets deported thousands of Latvians in one night, mostly to which region?
Siberia
Siberia. Families were packed into cattle cars, the men split off for labour camps and the women and children sent to remote settlements; 14 June is still a day of mourning in Latvia.
Q 19About 25,000 Jews from the Riga ghetto were murdered in late 1941 in which forest?
Rumbula
Rumbula. The shootings of 30 November and early December emptied most of the ghetto, which the occupiers then used to hold Jews deported from Germany.
Q 20Which Riga landmark is housed in five huge pavilions built from the frames of German Zeppelin hangars?
The Central Market
The Central Market. The steel frames came from First World War airship sheds at a German base in western Latvia, and they were rebuilt as five market halls that opened in 1930.
Gorbachev. The hardliners' putsch against the Soviet president fell apart on the very day Latvia's parliament voted, ending a transition that had begun with a first declaration in May 1990.
Q 24In 2004 Latvia joined NATO and, weeks later, which of these?
European Union
European Union. Latvia entered NATO in March 2004 and the EU on 1 May, reaching in one spring the two goals it had set itself after breaking from Moscow in 1991.
Q 25Which currency did Latvia give up when it adopted the euro in 2014?
The lats
The lats. Latvia had already lost it once, when Soviet rule swept it away in 1940, and had brought it back in 1993, two years after regaining independence.
Q 26Which Latvian president, elected in 2023, became the European Union's first openly gay head of state?
Edgars Rinkēvičs
Edgars Rinkēvičs. He had been foreign minister for twelve years, and in 2014 he came out in a tweet, the first Latvian lawmaker to say publicly that he was gay.
Q 27Legend says Latvia's flag copies a bloodstained white sheet, a tale much like that told of which country's flag?
Austria
Austria. Its red-white-red is said to recall a crusading duke's tunic, soaked in blood except where his belt had been, while Latvia's darker banner is recorded in a chronicle of the 1200s.
Q 28How does the white stripe on Latvia's flag compare in width with each red stripe?
Half as broad
Half as broad. The 2:1:2 stripes vanished from public view when the Soviets took over in 1940, and the flag was officially restored only in February 1990.
Q 29The female figure atop Riga's Freedom Monument is affectionately known by what name?
Milda
Milda. She holds three gilded stars aloft, and laying flowers at her feet was banned under Soviet rule until about 5,000 people defied the authorities there in June 1987.
Q 30Roughly one third of the buildings in central Riga are in which architectural style?
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau. Most of the buildings went up in a single boom between 1904 and 1914, when the city was growing fast, and several of the best known are by Mikhail Eisenstein.