Zurich Trivia
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58 free Zurich trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Zurich trivia quiz covers Switzerland's largest city from a Roman customs post to a global banking hub. The easy questions are ones any visitor could answer: the lake and river, whether it is the Swiss capital, the church whose twin towers dominate the skyline, the football body headquartered here, and the chocolate makers of Paradeplatz. The harder end is for travellers and history readers: the Roman name Turicum, the year Zurich joined the Old Swiss Confederacy, the reformer who preached from the Grossmünster and died at Kappel, the abbess who once ruled the city, the moat that became Bahnhofstrasse, the snowman burned every April and what its exploding head is supposed to foretell, the cabaret where Dada was born a few doors from Lenin's flat, the university with 22 Nobel laureates, the Irish novelist buried at Fluntern, and the British politician who called Swiss bankers gnomes. Grasshoppers, FC Zürich, the Street Parade, Weltklasse, Chagall's windows and the Uetliberg get questions too. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the city and its landmarks before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Switzerland, Geneva and Vienna quizzes next.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which river flows out of Lake Zurich through the city centre?
Limmat
Limmat is a second name for one river: the Linth pours into the far end of Lake Zurich and leaves through the city under its new name. Downstream it joins the Aare, which carries it on to the Rhine.
Q 02In 1848 Zurich lost a parliamentary vote to become the seat of Switzerland's new federal government; which city won?
Bern
Bern won the vote of 28 November 1848, ahead of Zurich and Lucerne; deputies seem to have been wary of making the country's strongest centre stronger still. Its official title is 'federal city' rather than capital.
Q 03What did the Romans call Zurich?
Turicum
Turicum is first recorded on a gravestone of about AD 200 that names the customs station there. The Romans ran it to tax goods crossing between Gaul and Raetia, the Alpine province next door.
Q 04On which small hill in Zurich's old town, now a quiet lookout, did the Romans build their fort?
Lindenhof
Lindenhof's fourth-century fort later gave way to a Carolingian royal palace, and Zurichers went on gathering on the hill for centuries. Today the terrace is a peaceful square where chess players meet.
Q 05Which Carolingian king founded Zurich's Fraumünster abbey in 853 for his daughter?
Louis the German
Louis the German handed the convent to his daughter Hildegard. Around 1045 it gained the rights to mint coins, levy tolls and hold markets, and its abbess became mistress of the city, appointing its chief magistrate.
Q 06Zurich joined the Swiss Confederacy as its fifth member to gain allies against which ruling house?
Habsburg
Habsburg was the threat: exiles based in Habsburg-held Rapperswil tried to topple Zurich's guild government in 1350, so the city allied with the forest cantons in May 1351, and a Habsburg duke besieged it within months.
Q 07Who launched the Swiss Reformation as chief preacher at the Grossmünster in 1519?
Huldrych Zwingli
Huldrych Zwingli's first public clash came in Lent 1522, when Zurich citizens pointedly ate sausages; he had not joined in, but he defended the fast-breakers in a sermon that became his first Reformation tract.
Q 08Where did the leader of Zurich's Reformation die in 1531?
On the battlefield at Kappel
On the battlefield at Kappel, where he fell among Zurich's troops; the Catholic cantons had declared war after Zurich and an ally cut off their supplies of grain and salt.
Q 09In legend, whose horse knelt over the graves of Zurich's patron saints, prompting him to found the Grossmünster?
Charlemagne
Charlemagne's horse, the legend says, knelt where Felix and Regula lay; the beheaded martyrs were said to have picked up their own heads and carried them forty paces uphill to choose their grave.
Q 10Which artist designed the five stained-glass windows in the Fraumünster choir, installed in 1970?
Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall was 83 when the choir windows went in, each glowing in one dominant colour, and he returned at about 90 to add a rose window in the transept.
Q 11Which Zurich street replaced a moat called the Frogs' Ditch?
Bahnhofstrasse
Bahnhofstrasse replaced the Fröschengraben, the ditch in front of the old city walls, which was filled in so a broad boulevard could link the railway station with the lake.
Q 12Which Zurich square, once a pig market, is now a byword for Swiss banking?
Paradeplatz
Paradeplatz was the Säumärt, a 17th-century livestock market, then Neumarkt, and took its present name in the 1860s; the big Swiss banks later built their head offices around it.
Q 13Which mountain of about 870 metres, reached by its own railway line, is known as Zurich's Hausberg?
Uetliberg
Q 21Which Zurich institution did the Swiss federal government found in 1854?
ETH Zurich
ETH Zurich was the compromise: liberals wanted a federal university, conservatives wanted higher education left to the cantons, so parliament settled on a federal polytechnic, which opened in 1855.
Q 22Which European first does the University of Zurich claim?
Earliest created by a state, not a monarch or church
Earliest created by a state, not a monarch or church: in 1833 the canton of Zurich merged its old colleges of theology, law and medicine and added an arts faculty, so a republic stood behind the new university.
Q 23Which world sports body is headquartered in Zurich?
Uetliberg draws crowds in winter because its summit often sits above the fog that blankets the city, with a clear view of the Alps.
Q 14Kreis 1, the first of Zurich's twelve numbered districts, goes by which name?
Altstadt
Altstadt, the old town, was the whole of Zurich until 1893, when the city merged with its ring of suburbs, became Switzerland's largest and needed numbered districts.
Q 15What is the traditional spring holiday at which Zurich's guilds parade and burn a snowman?
Sechseläuten
Sechseläuten means the six o'clock ringing of the bells: from spring a bell at six marked the end of the working day, and the guilds made a festival of the change.
Q 16What is the snowman effigy burned at Zurich's spring guild festival called?
Böögg
Böögg burning began apart from the guilds: people of Zurich's old Kratz quarter burned such figures each spring, and only in the 1890s did the guilds adopt the custom and turn the doll into a snowman standing for winter.
Q 17Which art movement was founded at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire in 1916?
Dada
Dada was a protest against the First World War: artists who had fled to neutral Zurich answered the slaughter with nonsense, wordless sound poems and irony.
Q 18Which revolutionary lived at Spiegelgasse 14, a few doors from Cabaret Voltaire, from 1916?
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin spent his Zurich year in the city's libraries, finishing his book on imperialism, and left in April 1917 on a train across wartime Germany after revolution toppled the tsar.
Q 19Which couple opened Cabaret Voltaire in the back room of a Zurich tavern in February 1916?
Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings
Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, a German poet and a cabaret singer, opened it as an artists' pub; on its stage he recited his 'verses without words', poems built purely from invented sounds.
Q 20Which physicist failed Zurich's polytechnic entrance exam at 16?
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein shone in maths and physics but fell short in the general subjects, so he spent a year at a school in Aarau before getting in; he came back in 1912 as a professor.
FIFA
FIFA's home on the Zürichberg hides about two-thirds of itself underground, including the chamber where its leaders meet and a meditation room.
Q 24Which football club, founded in 1886, holds the record of 27 Swiss league titles?
Grasshoppers
Grasshoppers were founded by an English student, Tom E. Griffith, as Zurich's first football club; the record champions later sank far enough to be relegated in 2019, their first drop in about seven decades.
Q 25What is the Weltklasse Zürich athletics meeting nicknamed?
The one-day Olympics
The one-day Olympics made history in 1960: Armin Hary ran the first 10.0-second 100 metres, saw it struck out as a false start, demanded a re-run and ran 10.0 again 35 minutes later.
Q 26Zurich's Street Parade techno festival officially remains what?
A demonstration
A demonstration is how it won its first permit in 1992, as a 'Demonstration for Love, Peace, Liberty, Generosity and Tolerance' with about a thousand dancers, and its organisers have kept that status ever since.
Q 27St. Peter, the oldest parish church in Zurich, holds which European record?
Largest church clock face
Largest church clock face: each dial is about 8.7 metres across. The tower belongs to the city rather than the parish, because Zurich's fire watchman kept lookout from it from 1340 until 1911.
Q 28The chocolatier Lindt & Sprüngli is based in which lakeside town just south of Zurich?
Kilchberg
Kilchberg got the chocolate works in 1899, when the Sprüngli firm finished a bigger factory there and, that same year, bought Rodolphe Lindt's business along with the secret recipe for his smooth-melting chocolate.
Q 29Which group branded Swiss bankers the 'gnomes of Zurich' during Britain's sterling crisis of 1964?
Labour politicians
Labour politicians, facing a run on the pound, blamed Swiss speculators: George Brown reportedly said the gnomes of Zurich were at work again, and Harold Wilson vowed to resist them.
Q 30Which Irish novelist worked on Ulysses in Zurich during World War I and is buried at Fluntern?
James Joyce
He died in the city in 1941.