35 Years of the Erasmus Programme

A blend of two central elements of the Erasmus programme: its original intellectual inspiration — Erasmus himself — and an allegory of his influence across Europe. The former is represented by one of the most recognised portraits of Erasmus; the latter by a web of connections passing from beacon to beacon across the coin, evoking the countless intellectual and personal exchanges between European students. Some of these connections form additional stars, born from the synergies between participating countries.

Fifth joint issue of the European Union. All 19 eurozone states are issuing a coin with the same design on varying dates. The coins differ only in their inscriptions, which appear in the respective national language.

Slovakia is among the more recent participating states of the Erasmus programme: after the end of communism and the social upheavals of the early 1990s, the country gradually opened up to partnerships with Western European universities. With EU accession in 2004, participation in the programme became fully institutionalised. Since then, Slovak universities — including Comenius University in Bratislava, one of the oldest universities in Central and Eastern Europe, and the Technical University of Košice — send thousands of students abroad in Europe each year. The Erasmus programme thus played a role for Slovakia not only in education policy but also socially: it accelerated the internationalisation of a higher-education landscape that was reorienting itself after decades of isolation.

The programme itself is named after the humanist Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, who taught and researched at universities in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Turin and Basel in the late 15th and early 16th centuries — a biography that embodied cross-border thinking and Europe's intellectual networking even before the modern era. His best-known work, the satirical "In Praise of Folly", was written in 1509 during his journey from Italy to England, at the house of his friend Thomas More. Since 1987, more than 13 million people have taken part in the Erasmus programme. For its 35th anniversary in 2022, all euro states jointly issued a common European coin — with Slovakia minting its national version of this 2-euro commemorative coin featuring the shared design.