North Macedonia Trivia
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47 free North Macedonia trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
North Macedonia is a landlocked Balkan republic of 1.8 million people that spent 27 years arguing with Greece about its own name before the Prespa Agreement of 2018 settled it. It sits on the ancient lands of Paeonia, was a cradle of the Cyrillic script at Ohrid, and gave the world Mother Teresa. This quiz covers the geography (Skopje and the Vardar valley, Lake Ohrid's 288-metre depths, Mount Korab, the Šar Mountains, Bitola and Tetovo), the history from Philip II and Rome through Tsar Samuil, five Ottoman centuries, the Ilinden Uprising, the Balkan Wars, Yugoslavia and the peaceful secession of 1991, and the modern state: the 2001 conflict and Ohrid Agreement, the Vergina Sun flag row, NATO membership in 2020, Bulgaria's EU veto and the first female president in 2024. Culture and daily life follow: Macedonian and co-official Albanian, the Orthodox and Muslim communities, ajvar and Ohrid trout, RK Vardar's handball titles, Skopje 2014's statues, the 1963 earthquake and the Polish architect who rebuilt the city, and the eight-rayed sun of the flag. Easy questions ask which country blocked the name; hard ones want the Roman capital of Macedonia Salutaris and the year the Ohrid Literary School was founded. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on North Macedonia, Skopje, Lake Ohrid, Ohrid, the flag, the Prespa Agreement, Mother Teresa and ajvar, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Skopje's giant bronze 'Warrior on a Horse' is understood to depict whom?
Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great. Officially the statue was only ever a 'warrior': the ancient king's legacy was one of the sore points in the quarrel with the country's southern neighbour, and a plaque naming him was added only later.
Q 02Which country shares North Macedonia's northern border with Serbia?
Kosovo
Kosovo. North Macedonia has five neighbours, and this is the newest: Skopje recognised Kosovo's independence in October 2008, months after it was declared, despite protests from Serbia.
Q 03Goran Pandev, North Macedonia's record goalscorer, won the Champions League in 2010 with which Italian club?
Inter Milan
Inter Milan. Pandev arrived in early 2010 and won the league, cup and Champions League within months; a decade later his goal against Georgia sent North Macedonia to its first major tournament.
Q 04Which 2018 agreement, named after a lake, saw Macedonia add 'North' to its name?
Prespa
Prespa. The two foreign ministers signed it in June 2018 in a border village on the lake's shore, with both prime ministers looking on; the new name took effect on 12 February 2019, ending a 27-year dispute.
Q 05Which country's objections drove the long dispute over the name Macedonia?
Greece
Greece has a northern region of its own called Macedonia and saw the name as a claim on it; in 1994 it went as far as a trade embargo on its new neighbour, lifted only when the two signed an interim accord in 1995.
Q 06Which North Macedonian film of 2019 was the first documentary nominated for both the documentary and international feature Oscars?
Honeyland
Honeyland. Over three years its makers filmed Hatidže Muratova, one of Europe's last keepers of wild bees, whose rule is to leave half the honey for the hive; a neighbour who ignores it brings ruin on both their colonies.
Q 07What was the result of Macedonia's 2018 referendum on its name?
90% approval but too low a turnout
90% approval but too low a turnout: a boycott held participation to about 37%, short of the 50% needed for the vote to count, so the decision passed to parliament, which approved the change by a two-thirds majority.
Q 08Which organisation did North Macedonia join as its 30th member in 2020?
NATO
NATO. The alliance had been ready to invite the country since its 2008 Bucharest summit, but the quarrel over the name held the invitation back for ten years; once the name changed, every member ratified within about a year.
Q 09After the name dispute was settled, which EU member blocked the start of North Macedonia's accession talks in November 2020?
Bulgaria
Bulgaria. Sofia accused its neighbour of dragging its feet on a 2017 friendship treaty that touches on shared history; it lifted the veto in 2022 under a French compromise that asks for a Bulgarian minority to be named in the constitution.
Q 10In 1991 Macedonia alone left Yugoslavia without what?
A war
A war. Voters backed independence on 8 September 1991, now Independence Day, and Belgrade neither sent the army in nor protested, while Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia all had to fight their way out.
Q 11Rebels who seized the town of Kruševo in the 1903 Ilinden Uprising proclaimed what?
A republic
A republic. The Kruševo Republic lasted from 3 to 13 August 1903 before Ottoman troops retook the town, and the day the uprising began, St Elijah's Day on 2 August, is now North Macedonia's Republic Day.
Q 12Macedonia entered the UN in 1993 under a provisional name shortened to what?
FYROM
FYROM, short for 'the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia'. The stopgap wording let the country take its seat while its name was still disputed, and it stuck for 26 years, until the change to North Macedonia in 2019.
Q 13Which king of Macedon absorbed Pelagonia and the south of the Paeonian kingdom in 356 BC?
Philip II
Q 21A gunman from the Macedonian group IMRO shot King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in which French port in 1934?
Marseille
Marseille. Vlado Chernozemski opened fire as the king's car crawled through the crowd at the start of a state visit, and a newsreel cameraman a few metres away kept filming: it was one of the first assassinations caught on camera.
Q 22Since the 1960s, an international festival in the lakeside town of Struga has awarded its Golden Wreath to masters of which art?
Poetry
Poetry. The Struga Poetry Evenings honour the Miladinov brothers, poets born in the town; laureates such as W. H. Auden, Pablo Neruda and Seamus Heaney each have a memorial board in its Park of Poetry.
Q 23Macedonian, North Macedonia's national language, is written in which script?
Cyrillic
Philip II made the Paeonian king his subject that year, so the south of today's North Macedonia joined the ancient kingdom as conquered land; the kingdom's own heartland lay further south.
Q 14What 66-metre structure was built on Mount Vodno above Skopje in 2002 to mark 2,000 years of Christianity?
A cross
A cross. The Millennium Cross, one of the biggest in the world, stands on the mountain's highest point; covered in lights after dark, it can be seen from almost every part of the capital, and a lift now runs up inside it.
Q 15The Ohrid Literary School, founded by Saint Clement in 886, trained clergy to hold services in which language?
Old Church Slavonic
Old Church Slavonic. Until then services had been held in Greek by clergy sent from Byzantium; Clement is said to have taught some 3,500 pupils in seven years, in what is often called the first Slavic school of higher learning.
Q 16Which tsar, whose fortress still crowns the old town, made Ohrid his capital before Basil II's victory of 1014?
Samuil
Samuil. After the defeat at Kleidion in 1014, Basil II had thousands of captured soldiers blinded and sent home; the tsar died two months later, reportedly of a heart attack brought on by the sight of them.
Q 17Skopje served as capital of which 14th-century emperor's realm?
Stefan Dušan of Serbia
Stefan Dušan of Serbia had himself crowned emperor in Skopje in 1346, at the peak of his conquests; the empire began to break up after his sudden death in 1355, and within decades the Ottomans held the region.
Q 18Ottoman rule over what is now North Macedonia ended with which conflict?
The Balkan Wars of 1912-13
The Balkan Wars of 1912-13 drove the Ottomans out but brought no independence: the victors divided the wider region of Macedonia among themselves, and the part that is now North Macedonia went to Serbia.
Q 19Macedonia's Jews, nearly all deported to Treblinka in March 1943, spoke Ladino, a language their ancestors had brought from which country?
Spain
Spain. The community grew from Sephardic refugees welcomed by the Ottomans after the expulsions of the 1490s; in March 1943 the occupying authorities held some 7,200 of them in a Skopje tobacco warehouse before the trains left.
Q 20The Tikveš plain around the towns of Kavadarci and Negotino is the heart of which North Macedonian industry?
Winemaking
Winemaking. Long, hot summers ripen the grapes on the Tikveš plain, where wine has been made since antiquity; the winery named after the plain dates from 1885.
Cyrillic. The Macedonian version, with 31 letters, was adopted only on 5 May 1945, when the language was first given an official standard; the date is now kept as Macedonian Language Day.
Q 24Which peak on the western border is the highest in North Macedonia?
Mount Korab
Mount Korab, 2,764 metres high, is the roof of two countries at once, since the border runs along it and neither neighbour has anything higher; its outline appears on North Macedonia's coat of arms.
Q 25Which river drains most of North Macedonia's territory to the Aegean Sea?
The Vardar
The Vardar runs the length of the country, through Skopje and on to the Aegean, and its valley carries the main road and railway south, the same corridor that traders and armies have followed since antiquity.
Q 26Lake Ohrid, the deepest lake in the Balkans, also ranks among Europe's what?
Oldest
Oldest: the lake has existed for well over a million years, long enough for more than 200 species found nowhere else, among them the Ohrid trout, to evolve in its waters.
Q 27Lake Ohrid's Macedonian shore received which international designation in 1979?
World Heritage site
World Heritage site. UNESCO listed the lake for its nature in 1979 and added the town's churches and old quarter in 1980, which makes Ohrid one of the rare sites inscribed for both nature and culture.
Q 28Ohrid's legendary 365 churches earned it which nickname?
Jerusalem of the Balkans
Jerusalem of the Balkans. The count, one church for each day of the year, goes back at least to the 17th-century Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi; far fewer stand today, but they still hold hundreds of Byzantine-style icons.
Q 29Which disaster struck Skopje in 1963, killing over 1,000 people?
An earthquake
An earthquake struck at 5:17 on the morning of 26 July 1963 and left about 80 percent of the city in ruins; relief came from 78 countries, and rebuilt Skopje became known as the City of International Solidarity.
Q 30Which Japanese architect won a United Nations competition in 1965 with his master plan for rebuilding central Skopje?
Kenzo Tange
Kenzo Tange. Fresh from his Tokyo Olympic arenas, he proposed ringing the centre with a 'City Wall' of housing blocks; only parts of the plan were built, among them the wall and the new railway station.