100th Anniversary of the Death of Milan Rastislav Štefánik

A portrait of Milan Rastislav Štefánik in military uniform; the semicircular inscription 'MILAN RASTISLAV ŠTEFÁNIK' and the issuing state 'SLOVENSKO'; Štefánik's birth and death years '1880' and '1919', the year '2019', the stylised initials of designer Peter Valach, and the mintmark.

Milan Rastislav Štefánik occupies a singular place in Slovak history: as co-founder of Czechoslovakia in 1918, he is to Slovakia what other nations attribute to their founding fathers. Born in 1880 in Košariská, he left his homeland early and built a career in France as an astronomer and diplomat. During the First World War, holding the rank of a French general, he organised Czechoslovak legions in France, Italy, Russia and Siberia - a military-diplomatic achievement that was instrumental in securing Allied recognition of the new state. Štefánik thus embodies the bridge between Western European diplomacy and Slovak national consciousness.

His death on 4 May 1919 - his aeroplane crashed while approaching to land in Bratislava - ended a career that had barely begun to exert political influence. The circumstances of the crash remain unresolved to this day and have made Štefánik a focal point of national memory. Slovakia honours him with numerous monuments, his portrait on earlier banknotes, and a mausoleum on Bradlo Hill. For the hundredth anniversary of his death in 2019, Slovakia commemorated with a 2-euro coin a man whose name in the country stands equally for state independence and for a cosmopolitan, European outlook.