A week ago I teamed up with some friends and family to take part in a pub quiz for the first time this year. I wanted to catch up with the guy who hosts it, and there was also a decent jackpot on offer: £680, in cash. The prize for the winning team is a £50 bar tab and a chance at the jackpot question. The winners nominate a team member to have a crack at it. We did not win the quiz. We were 6 points behind the winners, partly because they earned 3 points for a non-quizzing bonus round: finding a small replica plastic toilet hidden somewhere in the bar. If we had found it instead we would have been level on points with them. There would have been a tie-break and maybe a shot at the cash prize.

The jackpot question was as follows: “What is the capital of Serbia?” I knew the answer and whispered it to one of my team-mates. There was a delay before the nominated team member answered, incorrectly. “Bucharest,” she said. It was an OK wrong answer, a European capital that begins with B. As you may know, the correct answer is Belgrade. Bucharest is the capital of Romania.

I have written before on this Blog about people who could have made money if they knew some of the things that are listed here. This piece from 2017 was specifically about the ITV quiz show “Tenable” and some mnemonics that had already appeared on this site. This Word of the week piece mentions a contestant on another ITV quiz show, “The 1% Club”, who missed out on a £98,000 jackpot last year. He would have won it if he had known that forty is the only number in English that meets the following criterion: If you write it out as a word, all of its letters are in alphabetical order. Last week’s jackpot wasn’t in the same league but we would have been happy with it. It is the largest cash prize that I know of at any local pub quiz.

You would have to dig around a bit on this site to find a reference to Belgrade, but you will find it on this page, along with Bucharest, in a list of capital cities that begin with B. There are 26 in all. More capital cities begin with B than any other letter. For the record, more countries begin with S than any other letter (also 26). Back in 2019 there were 27 of each but Bujumbura is no longer the capital of Burundi, and Swaziland has a new name (eSwatini).

Until the early 1990s Belgrade was the capital of Yugoslavia, before the country collapsed into civil war and several smaller republics emerged. There are currently six former Yugoslav republics that meet the usual criteria for independent nations: sovereign states that are members of the UN. They are Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia. Kosovo is not yet recognized by the UN as a sovereign state. I have never visited any part of the former Yugoslavia but can name all six republics, and their capitals. In the same order as the list above: Belgrade, Sarajevo, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Podgorica and Skopje. If Kosovo becomes a country in its own right I guess its capital would be Pristina. And what is all this knowledge worth? So far, not very much, but a week ago it would have made us a few hundred quid.