35 Years of the Erasmus Programme

A blend of two defining elements of the Erasmus programme: its original intellectual inspiration — Erasmus himself — and an allegory of his influence on Europe. The former is evoked by one of the most familiar depictions of Erasmus; the latter by a network of connections that leap from beacon to beacon across the coin's surface, representing the countless intellectual and human exchanges between European students. Several of these connections form additional stars, born from the synergies between countries.

Fifth EU joint issue. All 19 eurozone states are releasing a coin with this design on various dates. The coins differ only in the inscription, which appears in the respective national language.

When the European Community launched the Erasmus programme in 1987, it was a comparatively modest undertaking: 3,244 students from eleven countries spent their first semester abroad with funding from Brussels. The programme was named after the Dutch humanist and scholar Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, who himself travelled across Europe in the late 15th and early 16th centuries — to Paris, London, Turin, Bologna and Basel — and whose work was shaped precisely by this transnational exchange. Erasmus of Rotterdam is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of humanism: his writings, including "In Praise of Folly", combined critical scholarship with a pan-European perspective that transcended boundaries between national education traditions.

What began as a 1987 exchange programme has since become one of the largest education programmes in the world. Now known as Erasmus+, it covers not just universities but also vocational training, schools, adult education and youth work; by 2022, more than twelve million people across Europe had taken part in Erasmus activities. The Netherlands, as the home country of the programme's namesake and traditionally deeply embedded in the European university network, has been a central participating country from the start. To mark the Erasmus programme's 35th anniversary, all euro countries jointly issued a common European coin in 2022 — one of the rare series in which every euro state mints the same design.