Stockholm Trivia
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57 free Stockholm trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Stockholm is a capital of fourteen islands founded to keep pirates off a lake, and this quiz covers everything from Birger Jarl to Spotify. The history runs through Birka, the 1436 charter, the Bloodbath of 1520, Gustav Vasa, Queen Christina and Descartes, the Tre Kronor fire, the 1710 plague, Gustav III's opera and the demolition of Klara. The sights get their share: the Vasa's 1,300-metre voyage and 1961 salvage, Gamla Stan's old name, Östberg's City Hall and its 18 million tiles, the 1,430-room palace, Drottningholm's theatre, Skansen, Gröna Lund and ABBA's museum on Djurgården, the world's longest art gallery under the streets and the congestion tax above them. Then the Nobel ceremonies and why they fall on 10 December, the 1912 Olympics, AIK, Djurgården and Hammarby, Globen's Eurovisions, the Kreditbanken hostages who named a syndrome and the city's unicorns. Easy questions ask which band made the city famous and where the airport is; hard ones want the Nationalmuseum's founding king and the year of the first charter. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the city and its landmarks, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Try our Sweden and Copenhagen quizzes next.
30 of 57 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Central Stockholm is spread across how many islands?
Fourteen
Fourteen. They sit where a great inland lake meets the Baltic, and by about 1200 ships had to unload there, one reason a trading town grew up at the spot.
Q 02Which Swedish ruler, whose 1252 letters first mention Stockholm, is traditionally called its founder?
Birger Jarl
Birger Jarl. German merchants were invited to settle and trade there free of customs duties, and by the end of the 13th century the new town had become the largest in Sweden.
Q 03In the world's largest scale model of the Solar System, Stockholm's giant spherical Globe arena plays which body?
The Sun
The Sun. With the arena as the Sun, the scale puts the inner planets around Stockholm but Pluto about 300 km to the north, a road trip that shows how empty the Solar System really is.
Q 04Which freshwater lake, Sweden's third largest, flows out into the Baltic at Stockholm?
Mälaren
Mälaren. In Viking times it was a bay of the Baltic that ships could sail far inland; the land, still rising since the Ice Age, made its mouth too shallow by about 1200 and turned it into a lake.
Q 05Which Viking Age trading centre near Stockholm is a World Heritage Site?
Birka
Its restored remains sit on a lake island; the site of Stockholm itself appears in the sagas as Agnafit.
Q 06The Stockholm Bloodbath of November 1520 followed the coronation of which union king?
Christian II
Christian II had promised his Swedish opponents an amnesty; the killings earned him the name Christian the Tyrant in Sweden and set off the revolt that broke the Kalmar Union.
Q 07Which Stockholm body chooses the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine?
The Karolinska Institute
The Karolinska Institute was given the job in Alfred Nobel's own will, and today fifty of its professors, sitting as the Nobel Assembly, make the final choice.
Q 08Which philosopher died in Stockholm in 1650, months after arriving to tutor Queen Christina?
Descartes
Descartes, who liked to lie in bed until late morning, had to teach Christina at five in the morning in a cold, draughty castle; he fell ill and died within months of arriving.
Q 09Stockholm Palace replaced which medieval royal castle, destroyed by fire in 1697?
Tre Kronor
Tre Kronor took most of Sweden's royal archives and national library with it, which is why the country's medieval history is unusually hard to document.
Q 10Stockholm's Storkyrkan cathedral hosted which royal's wedding in June 2010?
Crown Princess Victoria
Crown Princess Victoria married Daniel Westling, the personal trainer she had met at her gym, on 19 June, her parents' own wedding anniversary.
Q 11Which architect designed Stockholm Palace, with Carl Hårleman completing it after his death in 1728?
Nicodemus Tessin the Younger
Nicodemus Tessin the Younger had just rebuilt the old castle's north wing when the 1697 fire gutted the rest, so he designed the new palace around the walls still standing.
Q 12UNESCO's listing for Drottningholm praises its palace, gardens, Chinese Pavilion and which perfectly preserved 1766 building?
The court theatre
The court theatre survived by neglect: long used as a furniture store, it was rediscovered in 1921 with its original sets and wooden stage machinery still in working order.
Q 13UNESCO calls Drottningholm the finest northern European royal residence inspired by which palace?
Q 21Where in Stockholm is the Nobel Prize award ceremony held each December?
The Concert Hall
The Concert Hall, the blue building on Hötorget, hosts only the prize-giving; afterwards the laureates and their guests cross the city centre for the banquet at the City Hall.
Q 22Skansen on Djurgården, founded in 1891 by Artur Hazelius, is Sweden's oldest what?
Open-air museum
Open-air museum: Hazelius bought old farmsteads and houses all over Sweden and had them moved to the hill piece by piece, and 'skansen' became the word for such museums across central Europe.
Q 23The Stockholm metro, opened in 1950, has been called the world's longest what?
Art gallery
Versailles
Versailles was the model, but the builder was a queen: Hedvig Eleonora bought the estate in 1661, saw the old house burn down that December and ordered a grander palace in its place.
Q 14The warship Vasa sank on her maiden voyage in 1628 after sailing roughly how far?
1,300 metres
1,300 metres was as far as she got, still in sight of the shipyard that built her; 35 years later, divers using a newly perfected diving bell hauled up almost all her cannon.
Q 15Why did the Vasa sink on her 1628 maiden voyage?
Top-heavy build
A top-heavy build sank her, and the navy had seen it coming: when thirty men ran across her deck in a stability test, she rolled so badly that the admiral stopped it, yet she sailed anyway.
Q 16Junibacken, the children's museum on Djurgården, is devoted above all to which author?
Astrid Lindgren
Astrid Lindgren lent her story world on one condition: other writers and illustrators had to be shown too, because she wanted no part of a museum about herself.
Q 17Gamla Stan, Stockholm's historic core, was officially called what until 1980?
The Town between the Bridges
The Town between the Bridges stayed the official name long after locals had moved on: the metro station called Gamla stan opened in 1957, 23 years before the city caught up.
Q 18Stockholm City Hall, venue of the Nobel banquet, was built 1911–23 by which architect?
Ragnar Östberg
Ragnar Östberg kept reworking the design through all twelve years of building, and the lantern that tops the tower was one of his late changes of plan.
Q 19Which Stockholm City Hall room, left as bare red brick, hosts the Nobel banquet?
The Blue Hall
The Blue Hall was meant to be blue until its architect saw the red brick and left it bare, and the name stuck; after dinner, the guests climb the stairs to the Golden Hall to dance.
Q 20Why are the Nobel Prizes presented in Stockholm on 10 December each year?
Alfred Nobel died that day
Alfred Nobel died that day in 1896, and his will caused astonishment by leaving 94 percent of his fortune to fund the prizes, first handed out on the fifth anniversary in 1901.
Art gallery: two artists campaigned in the 1950s until the city council voted to put art in the stations, and more than 90 of the 100 stations now carry it.
Q 24At which station do all three lines of the Stockholm Metro meet?
T-Centralen
T-Centralen opened in 1957 as plain Centralen; the T for tunnelbana was added two months later because passengers kept confusing it with the main railway station next door.
Q 25After a seven-month trial and a referendum, Stockholm made which traffic measure permanent in 2007?
Congestion charge
Congestion charge: the city's own voters narrowly said yes in 2006 while the surrounding municipalities that held votes said no, and parliament made it permanent the next year.
Q 26Sweden's largest airport, serving Stockholm, is called what?
Arlanda
Arlanda was planned from the 1940s because the runways at Bromma, the airport inside the city, were too short for the long-haul airliners due to fly to North America.
Q 27Who was stripped of two Stockholm 1912 golds?
Jim Thorpe
Jim Thorpe won the pentathlon and decathlon, then lost both golds for having played paid baseball; his family got medals back only in 1983, thirty years after his death, and the IOC named him sole winner again in 2022.
Q 28As of 2025, which Stockholm football club plays its home matches at Sweden's national stadium in Solna?
AIK
AIK moved in for the 2013 season, months after the stadium opened as Friends Arena, a name chosen because the bank that bought the naming rights gave them to a charity fighting school bullying.
Q 29The Globe, Stockholm's giant spherical arena, was renamed in 2021 in memory of which DJ?
Avicii
Avicii, born Tim Bergling in Stockholm, died in 2018; the new name was agreed with his family's foundation to draw attention to mental illness among young people.
Q 30Which pop group has had its own museum on Stockholm's Djurgården since 2013?
ABBA
ABBA's museum keeps a red phone whose number only the four band members know; when it rings, whichever visitor picks up gets to talk to one of them.