Romania Trivia
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69 free Romania trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Romania trivia quiz covers the whole country. It opens with the basics — the capital, the Black Sea, the neighbours, the leu — then moves through the history: Burebista and Trajan's Dacia, the 1859 union of Moldavia and Wallachia, independence from the Ottomans, Greater Romania in 1918, King Michael's forced abdication, Ceaușescu's Securitate and the revolution that began in Timișoara in December 1989. Then come the things people actually argue about at pub quizzes: whether Bran Castle has anything to do with Dracula, where Vlad the Impaler was born, why the Palace of the Parliament is the heaviest building on Earth, how Nadia Comăneci's perfect 10 showed up on the scoreboard, Hagi's nickname, Steaua's 1986 European Cup, Brâncuși's Bird in Space, the Voroneț blue, the Merry Cemetery, țuică and mămăligă. About a third are easy warm-ups; the rest climb to real stumpers. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's Romania articles and the sources they cite, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 69 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital and largest city of Romania?
Bucharest
Bucharest. Its name first appears in a 1459 document signed by Vlad the Impaler, who built a fortress there.
Q 02Romania's only coastline lies on which sea?
Black Sea
Black Sea. Ancient Greeks planted trading colonies along this coast, and one of them, Tomis, grew into today's port city of Constanța.
Q 03Which country lies across the Danube's Iron Gates gorge from southwestern Romania?
Serbia
Serbia. Romania and what was then Yugoslavia dammed the gorge together in 1972, sharing the power equally and drowning the inhabited island of Ada Kaleh.
Q 04Which Roman poet was banished by Emperor Augustus to Tomis, now the Romanian city of Constanța?
Ovid
Ovid. He blamed 'a poem and a mistake' without ever saying what the mistake was, and died in exile there about a decade later.
Q 05The Romanian language descends mainly from which ancient language?
Latin
Latin. Historians still debate where the language took shape after Rome left Dacia in the 270s, but it grew up cut off from its sister tongues among Slavic-speaking neighbours.
Q 06The modern Romanian state was formed in 1859 by uniting Wallachia with which other principality?
Moldavia
Moldavia. The great powers wanted the two principalities kept apart, so each simply elected the same prince, Alexandru Ioan Cuza, within weeks of the other.
Q 07Romania gained independence from which empire in 1877?
Ottoman
Ottoman. Romania declared independence in May 1877 and fought beside Russia against its old overlord; the Treaty of Berlin recognised the new state a year later.
Q 08Romania's Great Union Day marks a 1918 assembly at Alba Iulia that voted to unite which region with the kingdom?
Transylvania
Transylvania. The mass assembly met as Austria-Hungary collapsed, and the peace treaties that followed more than doubled Romania's size.
Q 09Which Roman emperor conquered Dacia in 106 AD and turned much of it into a Roman province?
Trajan
Trajan. He settled the new province with legionaries and colonists from as far away as Gaul, Spain and Syria, but Rome abandoned it under Aurelian in the 270s as attacks mounted.
Q 10DNA from a 40,000-year-old jawbone found in Romania's Peștera cu Oase revealed a recent ancestor of which kind?
Neanderthal
Neanderthal. Some 6–9% of the modern human's genome was Neanderthal, more than in any other sequenced at the time, which put the mixing just four to six generations back.
Q 11Romania's tricolour flag is almost identical to the flag of which African country?
Chad
Chad. The two matched from 1989, when Romania dropped the communist emblem from the centre; in 2004 its president refused to change the flag, noting Chad had been independent only since 1960.
Q 12What is the currency of Romania?
Leu
Leu. The name means 'lion', a memory of the lion-stamped Dutch coins that circulated across the Balkans in the 17th century.
Q 13Which novelist set Dracula in Romania without ever travelling to the country?
Bram Stoker
Bram Stoker. He worked from library research, yet filled the 1897 novel with real places that visitors can still find today.
Q 21Historian Radu Florescu places Vlad the Impaler's birth in which UNESCO-listed Saxon town?
Sighișoara
Sighișoara. Vlad's father was living there in exile from Wallachia, in a stone house on the main square, when the future prince was born around 1431.
Q 22Which Neo-Renaissance royal residence at Sinaia was begun in 1873 as a summer home for King Carol I?
Peleș Castle
Peleș Castle. Built with its own power plant, it is billed as Europe's first castle lit by electricity; the communists seized it from the royal family in the late 1940s and made it a museum.
Q 23Guinness names which Romanian landmark the world's heaviest building?
Palace of the Parliament
Q 14Which Marvel actor was born in Constanța and left Romania as a child after the 1989 revolution?
Sebastian Stan
Sebastian Stan. He moved to Vienna at eight with his mother, a pianist, and won his first film part there before the two settled in New York State when he was twelve.
Q 15The Danube Delta is the main European breeding ground of which large waterbird?
Pelicans
Pelicans. Great white pelicans fly in each spring to raise their young among the delta's lakes and reed beds, which hold their largest population in Europe, and leave again in autumn.
Q 16Romania has more of which large wild animal than any other country in the European Union?
Brown bears
Brown bears. Romania banned trophy hunting of them in 2016, and within a few years villagers were complaining of bears raiding crops and killing livestock.
Q 17Romania's capital has its own version of which Paris monument, built to honour its soldiers of World War I?
The Arc de Triomphe
The Arc de Triomphe. Troops home from the war of independence marched under a temporary wooden arch in 1878; a plaster-clad one followed in 1922, and today's stone arch was inaugurated in 1936.
Q 18Vlad the Impaler's 1462 Night Attack at Târgoviște targeted which sultan, the conqueror of Constantinople?
Mehmed II
Mehmed II. Vlad's raiders stormed the camp hoping to kill him and failed, yet the sultan soon turned for home after passing a field of thousands of impaled captives.
Q 19Vlad the Impaler's name Dracula came from his father's membership of which chivalric order?
The Dragon
The Dragon. Emperor Sigismund founded the order to defend Christian Europe; Vlad's father joined around 1431 and became 'Dracul', which made his son Dracula, 'son of Dracul'.
Q 20Which castle near Brașov is marketed as 'Dracula's Castle', though Vlad the Impaler never lived there?
Bran
Bran. Queen Marie made the fortress a royal home, the communists seized it in 1948, and in 2006 it was handed back to her grandson, a New York architect.
Palace of the Parliament. Some 700 architects worked on the marble giant for Ceaușescu, and a whole district of the old capital was razed to make room for it.
Q 24Which US president paid an official visit to Ceaușescu's Romania in August 1969, two weeks after the Moon landing?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon. Ceaușescu was then steering Romania away from Soviet foreign policy, and Gerald Ford repeated the visit six years later to the day.
Q 25Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were executed by firing squad on which date in 1989?
Christmas Day
Christmas Day. A secret military tribunal convicted the couple and they were shot at once; film of the trial and the bodies was soon shown on television in Romania and around the world.
Q 26The Romanian revolution of December 1989 began in which western city?
Timișoara
Timișoara. Crowds gathered there to defend a dissident pastor, László Tőkés, from the authorities, and within ten days the protests had spread and toppled the regime.
Q 27What was the name of Ceaușescu's feared secret police?
Securitate
Securitate. Set up in 1948 with Soviet guidance as the centre of a vast security network, it was dissolved days after Ceaușescu fell and its work split among new agencies.
Q 28Ceaușescu enjoyed a surge in popularity in 1968 for publicly condemning what?
The invasion of Czechoslovakia
The invasion of Czechoslovakia. He had gone to Prague days earlier to back its reformist leader, and Romania sent no troops when its Warsaw Pact allies marched in.
Q 29Which Romanian mountain road was blasted across the Carpathians in the early 1970s for military use under Ceaușescu?
The Transfăgărășan
The Transfăgărășan. Army crews cut it over the Făgăraș Mountains with dynamite to move troops, and it is now driven for pleasure as one of Romania's great scenic routes.
Q 30Nadia Comăneci scored her history-making perfect 10s at the 1976 Olympics in which city?
Montreal
Montreal. Her first 10 came on the uneven bars, where the scoreboard flashed 1.00, and the 14-year-old went on to collect seven perfect scores at those Games.