Vienna Trivia
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48 free Vienna trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Vienna was a Roman camp called Vindobona, the seat of the Habsburgs and Holy Roman Emperors for centuries, the biggest German-speaking city in the world until Berlin overtook it, and for ten years after 1945 a four-power city where a jeep with one soldier from each army patrolled the centre. This quiz covers that story: the Babenbergs, the Ottoman sieges of 1529 and 1683, the Congress of Vienna, the Ringstrasse, Red Vienna, the Anschluss and the 1955 State Treaty. It then does the Vienna people visit and eat: Schonbrunn's 1,441 rooms and the world's oldest zoo, St Stephen's tiled roof, the Hofburg and the Lipizzaners, the Riesenrad and the Prater, the Musikverein's New Year's Concert and the Radetzky March clap-along, the State Opera's Mozart opening, the Central Cemetery where Beethoven and Falco lie, coffee houses where Trotsky and Hitler both sat in 1913, the Sacher-Demel cake war, schnitzel and Heuriger wine. Freud, Klimt's Kiss, the Secession, Hundertwasser and Harry Lime in the sewers round it out. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Vienna and its landmarks, people and events, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Our Austria quiz covers the rest of the country.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What did the Romans call their camp on the site of Vienna?
Vindobona
Vindobona's defensive ditch was filled in during a late-12th-century expansion and became the Graben, now a famous shopping street in the heart of Vienna.
Q 02In Vienna, the sausage that Germans and Americans call a wiener goes by what name?
Frankfurter
Frankfurter: butcher Johann Georg Lahner, who trained in Frankfurt, is credited with launching it in Vienna in the early 1800s under that name, while other countries named it after Vienna instead.
Q 03Vienna became the seat of which dynasty in the 12th century, before the Habsburgs?
The Babenbergs
The Babenbergs ruled Austria from 976 to 1246; when Duke Henry II gave up Bavaria he set up court in Vienna, not at the old family seat of Klosterneuburg.
Q 04Which Ottoman sultan led the first siege of Vienna in 1529?
Suleiman the Magnificent
Suleiman the Magnificent had to abandon his heaviest siege guns when they bogged down in rain-soaked mud on the march, and he gave up the siege in under three weeks.
Q 05Which king commanded the relief army that broke the Ottoman siege at the Battle of Vienna in 1683?
John III Sobieski of Poland
John III Sobieski of Poland commanded the relief army that attacked from the Kahlenberg heights; Emperor Leopold I had fled Vienna before the siege began.
Q 06Who chaired the Congress of Vienna of 1814-15?
Klemens von Metternich
Klemens von Metternich, Austria's foreign minister, played host; the round of balls and banquets helped drag the talks out for months, and the Final Act came only days before Waterloo.
Q 07Vienna's grand Ringstrasse boulevard was built in the 19th century on the site of what?
The old city bastions and glacis
The old city bastions and glacis, the open field of fire outside them, came down after an 1857 imperial decree so the walled centre could join the suburbs absorbed in 1850.
Q 08Which city overtook Vienna as the world's largest German-speaking city?
Berlin
Berlin pulled ahead as both capitals boomed; Vienna passed two million by 1910, then shrank after 1918 when its empire broke up and many migrants went home.
Q 09Around 1900, Vienna was the second-largest city of which nationality, behind only its own capital?
Czechs
Czechs: only Prague had more. They came to work in Vienna's brickyards and as tailors, cooks and maids, and a wave went home to the new Czechoslovakia after 1918.
Q 10The years 1919 to 1934, when Social Democrats ran Vienna and built public housing, are known as what?
Red Vienna
Red Vienna paid for its housing with a steeply graduated rent tax that hit luxury flats hardest, plus levies on servants, big cars and riding horses.
Q 11Hitler proclaimed Austria's annexation in March 1938 from a Hofburg balcony overlooking which square?
Heldenplatz
Heldenplatz, 'Heroes' Square', is named for its two equestrian statues of Austrian commanders, Archduke Charles and Prince Eugene of Savoy; the 1938 rally made it shorthand for the Anschluss.
Q 12In four-power Vienna after 1945, who controlled the historic first district?
All four, rotating each month
All four, rotating each month: the first district was an international sector, policed by jeep patrols carrying one soldier from each army, the famous 'four in a jeep'.
Q 13What did Austria promise Moscow in 1955 to end its four-power occupation?
Q 21The Vienna Boys' Choir traces its origin to a 1498 letter from which emperor?
Maximilian I
Maximilian I ordered his court to hire a singing master, two basses and six boys; when the court chapel was dissolved after 1918, the choir was refounded in 1924 as a private body.
Q 22Vienna's Riesenrad Ferris wheel went up in 1897 to mark what?
Emperor's jubilee
Emperor's jubilee celebrations, for 50 years on the throne, were the occasion; by 1914 the wheel was a stunt stage, when a circus director sat on a horse on a cabin roof for a film scene.
Q 23Why was Vienna's Riesenrad Ferris wheel never demolished under a 1916 permit?
Lack of money
Permanent neutrality
Permanent neutrality: Austria pledged it in Moscow in April 1955, the treaty was signed in Vienna a month later, and parliament made it law the day after the troops' deadline to leave.
Q 14Which film, written by Graham Greene, uses occupied post-war Vienna as its backdrop?
The Third Man
The Third Man made a star of Anton Karas, an unknown Viennese zither player whom director Carol Reed picked to write and perform the whole score.
Q 15Orson Welles's Harry Lime flees Vienna's police through what?
The city's sewers
The city's sewers became world-famous through the chase, which used members of Vienna's real police sewer brigade, and the tunnels became a guided-tour attraction.
Q 16Schonbrunn Zoo, in the grounds of Vienna's imperial summer palace, holds what distinction?
World's oldest zoo still operating
The world's oldest zoo still operating began in 1752 as Emperor Francis I's menagerie; its enclosures fan out around a central pavilion where the imperial couple sometimes took breakfast.
Q 17Which two Cold War leaders held a tense 1961 summit in Vienna?
Kennedy and Khrushchev
Kennedy and Khrushchev got nowhere on divided Germany in two days of talks, and ten weeks later the Cold War's most famous wall went up.
Q 18The Pummerin, St Stephen's great bell, was first cast from what?
Ottoman cannons
Ottoman cannons captured when the siege of 1683 was broken supplied the metal; the bell crashed down and shattered in the cathedral fire of 1945, and its fragments went into the bell that hangs there now.
Q 19The Hofburg, a seat of rulers since 1279, has housed whose office since 1946?
The President of Austria
The President of Austria moved in 1946 into the Leopoldine Wing, the apartments where Empress Maria Theresa had lived; the Chancellor works next door on Ballhausplatz.
Q 20The Spanish Riding School in the Hofburg trains which breed of horse?
Lipizzaner
Lipizzaner horses descend partly from Spanish stock, which is what the school's name refers to; the breed itself is named after the imperial stud at Lipizza, founded in 1580 in today's Slovenia.
Lack of money in wartime meant the wheel simply stayed up; when fire later burned out all 30 cabins in the Second World War, only every second one was replaced, which is why it carries 15.
Q 24The Prater hosted which international event in 1873?
The Vienna World's Fair
The Vienna World's Fair drew about 7 million visitors, far fewer than hoped, after a stock-market crash and a cholera outbreak hit the city that same year.
Q 25Who makes the Vienna Philharmonic's major decisions?
Its musicians
Its musicians: the players' assembly runs the orchestra by vote and chooses who conducts it, a model set when the composer Otto Nicolai led the first concert in 1842.
Q 26Vienna's New Year's Concert traditionally ends with which piece, as the audience claps along?
The Radetzky March
The Radetzky March, by Johann Strauss the elder, is the final encore; the Blue Danube comes just before it, its opening bars interrupted for a New Year greeting from the stage.
Q 27Vienna's New Year's Concert has been held since 1939 in the Golden Hall of which building?
The Musikverein
The Musikverein hosted the very first one on New Year's Eve, 31 December 1939, not New Year's Day; the rival Konzerthaus is home to the Vienna Symphony instead.
Q 28The Vienna State Opera opened in 1869 with which Mozart opera?
Don Giovanni
Don Giovanni opened the new court opera on 25 May 1869; after bombs gutted the house in March 1945, it reopened in 1955 with a different choice, Beethoven's Fidelio.
Q 29Which composer was Vienna-born, alongside Schoenberg, Berg, Webern and the two Johann Strausses?
Franz Schubert
Franz Schubert was the local, born in 1797 in a suburb that is now Vienna's ninth district; Mozart came from Salzburg, Beethoven from Bonn and Haydn from the village of Rohrau.
Q 30Beethoven lies in Vienna's Central Cemetery, but in which cemetery, now a park, was he first buried in 1827?
Wahring Cemetery
Wahring Cemetery closed in 1873 and later became a public park, where Beethoven's old gravestone has been kept although his remains were moved across the city in 1888.