Lithuania Trivia
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47 free Lithuania trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Lithuania was once the largest country in Europe, the last pagan state on the continent, and the first Soviet republic to break away. It speaks the most conservative living Indo-European language, worships basketball, eats dumplings named after airships, has a hill covered in a hundred thousand crosses and a bohemian district that declared itself a republic on April Fools' Day. This Lithuania trivia quiz covers all of it. Forty-seven questions run from geography (Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaipėda, the Nemunas, Aukštojas Hill, the Curonian Spit, the centre of Europe) through history (Mindaugas and 1253, Gediminas and the Iron Wolf, Grunwald, the Union of Lublin, the partitions, the press ban, 16 February 1918, Smetona, the Soviet and Nazi occupations, the Forest Brothers, Sąjūdis, 11 March 1990, the January Events, NATO and the euro) to culture and sport (the flag and Vytis, Lithuanian and Latvian, Catholicism, Čiurlionis, cepelinai and šaltibarščiai, Užupis, the Hill of Crosses, Sabonis and Žalgiris, Alekna and Meilutytė). 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 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Lithuanian legend says a thunder god smashed a sea goddess's undersea palace, scattering which gem along the Baltic shore?
Amber
Amber, the tale of Jūratė and Kastytis says, is the wreckage of her palace, blasted by the thunder god because she loved a mortal fisherman; pieces still wash ashore after storms.
Q 02Who united the Lithuanian lands and was crowned the first and only King of Lithuania in 1253?
Mindaugas
Mindaugas accepted baptism in 1251 and was crowned two years later on the authority of Pope Innocent IV; after his assassination in 1263 Lithuania stayed pagan for more than a century.
Q 03At its 15th-century peak, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania held what distinction?
Largest country in Europe
Largest country in Europe: the Grand Duchy had swallowed Rus' lands left shattered by the Mongols, and under Vytautas the Great, who died in 1430, it stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
Q 04Which grand duke is credited with founding the capital after dreaming of an iron wolf on a hill?
Gediminas
Gediminas, the legend runs, had his pagan priest Lizdeika read the dream: the howling iron wolf meant a great city whose fame would carry across the world, so he built his capital on the spot.
Q 05At which 1410 battle did Polish–Lithuanian forces crush the Teutonic Order?
Grunwald
The Battle of Grunwald, Žalgiris to Lithuanians, was fought on 15 July 1410; Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen died on the field and the Teutonic Order never recovered its dominance.
Q 06Which grand duke accepted baptism and the Polish crown in 1386, ending Lithuania's time as Europe's last pagan state?
Jogaila
Jogaila was baptised, married Poland's young queen Jadwiga and took her country's crown in 1386, then brought Roman Christianity to Lithuania in 1387; Samogitia followed only in 1413.
Q 07The 1569 union that created the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was signed in which city?
Lublin
Lublin hosted the 1569 parliament where Lithuania, hard pressed in its war with Muscovy, accepted a joint state with Poland while keeping its own treasury, army and laws.
Q 08Poland–Lithuania's 3 May 1791 constitution is usually ranked the world's second modern written constitution, after which country's?
United States
United States: its constitution dates from 1787, and France's followed the Commonwealth's by only a few months; yet the Third Partition erased Poland–Lithuania itself in 1795.
Q 09Which power annexed most of Lithuania in the partitions completed in 1795?
Russia
Russia took the bulk of Lithuania in the Third Partition of 1795, the neighbouring powers' answer to the failed Kościuszko Uprising of 1794; Prussia received only the south-western corner, Užnemunė.
Q 10After the 1863 uprising, Tsarist authorities imposed what measure against the local culture?
A ban on the Lithuanian press
A ban on the Lithuanian press, lifted only in 1904, allowed Lithuanian books in Cyrillic alone; smugglers called knygnešiai carried Latin-alphabet books in from East Prussia, and the ban ended up feeding the national revival.
Q 11Which occupying power held Lithuania when its Council declared independence in February 1918?
Germany
Germany had occupied Lithuania since 1915 and wanted a satellite state, so it let a Lithuanian council meet. On 16 February 1918 that council declared full independence instead.
Q 12About two million people took part in the Baltic Way of 23 August 1989, a protest that took what form?
A human chain
A human chain ran more than 600 km from Vilnius through Riga to Tallinn on the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, whose secret protocols had handed the Baltic states to Stalin.
Q 13Who led the authoritarian regime installed by Lithuania's 1926 coup?
Antanas Smetona
Q 21What are the three colours of Lithuania's flag, top to bottom?
Yellow, green, red
Yellow, green, red: read as sun and golden fields, forests, and courage and blood shed for the homeland. Replaced by a red banner under Soviet rule, the tricolour came back before independence itself was declared in 1990.
Q 22Lithuania's coat of arms, an armoured knight on horseback, is known by what name?
Vytis
Vytis grew out of the seals of 14th-century grand dukes, who had themselves shown charging on horseback. Banned with every symbol of statehood under Soviet rule, the knight returned as the state arms in 1990.
Q 23Lithuanian is considered the most conservative living language of which family?
Indo-European
Antanas Smetona had been Lithuania's first president; the army officers' coup of December 1926 put him back, and he ruled as an authoritarian until the Soviet ultimatum of June 1940, when he fled abroad.
Q 14Which diplomat, serving in Lithuania in 1940, issued transit visas that let more than 2,000 Jewish refugees escape Europe?
Chiune Sugihara
Chiune Sugihara of Japan wrote the visas in summer 1940, even for refugees who lacked the papers the rules required. Those who stayed had no such exit: almost all of Lithuania's Jews were murdered after Germany invaded in 1941.
Q 15What were the Baltic guerrillas who fought Soviet rule after 1944 called?
Forest Brothers
Forest Brothers fought an organised war in Lithuania until 1953, when their commander Jonas Žemaitis, in hiding after a stroke, was captured. He was taken to Moscow, where Beria himself questioned him, and was shot in 1954.
Q 16Where in Vilnius did Soviet troops kill 14 unarmed civilians on 13 January 1991?
The TV tower
The TV tower was taken, but huge crowds ringed the parliament behind barricades and the attempt to topple the government failed.
Q 17Which movement, founded in the late 1980s, led Lithuania's drive to restore independence?
Sąjūdis
Sąjūdis began in June 1988 as a group of 35 intellectuals, 17 of them Communist Party members, backing Gorbachev's reforms. Within two years it had won the elections and declared Lithuania independent of the Soviet Union.
Q 18Who became Lithuania's first directly elected president after independence, in 1993?
Algirdas Brazauskas
Algirdas Brazauskas, the former Communist Party leader, won the February 1993 election to become Lithuania's first directly elected president; the last Russian troops withdrew on 31 August 1993.
Q 19Which president told Vilnius that Lithuania's enemies were America's?
George W. Bush
George W. Bush spoke in November 2002, days after NATO invited Lithuania to join. Membership followed in 2004, weeks before entry to the European Union, and Vilnius later made him an honorary citizen.
Q 20Why did the EU reject Lithuania's 2006 euro bid?
High inflation
High inflation, by a whisker: Lithuania's rate ran at 2.7 per cent against a limit of 2.6. It swapped the litas for the euro only on 1 January 2015, the last of the three Baltic states to do so.
Indo-European: Lithuanian keeps grammar and sounds otherwise found only in ancient tongues such as Sanskrit, so linguists use it to rebuild the lost parent language. 'Son' is sūnus in Lithuanian and sunus in Sanskrit.
Q 24Why did Lithuania's highest point change in the 2000s?
A GPS survey
A GPS survey: readings showed an unnamed rise about a metre taller than Juozapinė Hill, long taken for the summit. It was named Aukštojas, after the chief god of Baltic myth, and tops out just under 294 m.
Q 25What is the longest river in Lithuania?
Nemunas
The Nemunas runs 937 km from Belarus to the Curonian Lagoon. On 24 June 1812 Napoleon's Grande Armée, some 450,000 strong, began crossing it to invade Russia.
Q 26A granite column north of Vilnius marks which spot, worked out by French geographers in 1989?
The centre of Europe
The centre of Europe, on one reckoning: France's national geographic institute took the continent's centre of gravity and landed 26 km north of Vilnius. The column, crowned with stars, went up in 2004, the year Lithuania joined the EU.
Q 27Which river flows through the centre of Vilnius?
Neris
The Neris meets the little Vilnia below the castle hill in the old town. Upstream in Belarus, where it rises, the same river goes by another name, the Viliya.
Q 28Which Russian exclave borders Lithuania to the south-west?
Kaliningrad Oblast
Kaliningrad Oblast was the northern half of German East Prussia until 1945. It became a true exclave only in 1991, when Lithuania and the other Soviet republics lying between it and the rest of Russia became independent.
Q 29Which pilgrimage site did the Soviets bulldoze repeatedly, only for believers to rebuild it?
Hill of Crosses
The Hill of Crosses near Šiauliai was levelled in the 1960s and 1970s, its wooden crosses burned and its metal ones sold for scrap, yet new ones kept appearing after dark. After independence the count passed 100,000.
Q 30In which island castle did Vytautas the Great die in 1430, before he could be crowned king?
Trakai
Trakai was the brick castle Vytautas built up on a lake island. His claim to a royal crown had at last been agreed, but he died there in October 1430 before the ceremony could be held.