25 Years of the Slovak Republic

The outline of Slovakia and the euro symbol surrounded by EU stars, set beneath a stylised portal; the coat of arms of Slovakia and the state name 'SLOVENSKÁ REPUBLIKA'; the founding date '1.1.1993' and the year '2018', the stylised initials of designer Pavel Károly, and the mint mark.

The proof version of this coin was struck exclusively for the private use of the Slovak National Bank (NBS) and was not intended for sale. It is believed these were produced as gifts for special guests of the NBS, which is why a number of examples have entered the open market.

Few European states of the 20th century emerged as peacefully as Slovakia: on 1 January 1993, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic separated in the so-called Velvet Divorce — without a referendum, without armed conflict, through a parliamentary decision. The roots of independent Slovak statehood reach back much further; as early as 1918, the First Czechoslovak Republic had recognized the Slovaks as a state-forming nation, yet a fully independent republic, with Bratislava as its capital and complete sovereignty over domestic and foreign policy, did not emerge until 1993. In the years that followed, the country developed into a stable parliamentary democracy: in 2004 Slovakia joined NATO and the European Union, and in 2009 it became the first former socialist transformation country of the Visegrád Group to adopt the euro.

Slovakia looks back on a thousand-year history at the heart of Central Europe — from the Great Moravian realms of the 9th century, through its inclusion in the Kingdom of Hungary, to the formation of Czechoslovakia after the First World War. The Carpathian highlands, the Danube lowlands in the southwest, and a distinct linguistic development shaped an identity clearly different from that of its Bohemian neighbors, one that found political articulation in the 19th century as part of the national revival movement. The Slovak Republic took the 25th anniversary of its founding as an occasion to commemorate this historic turning point with a 2-euro commemorative coin in 2018.