10 000 Forint Ödön Lechner

Ödön Lechner (1845–1914) spent much of his career dismissed by the Habsburg architectural establishment, yet his synthesis of Hungarian folk motifs with Art Nouveau form produced buildings — the Applied Arts Museum and the Postal Savings Bank among them — that became defining national monuments. This coin marks the centenary of his death. The National Bank issued it within a broader commemorative program honoring figures central to Hungarian cultural identity in the post-Compromise period.

The Postal Savings Bank in Budapest, completed 1901, remains the most technically adventurous of his works — Lechner reportedly remarked that the birds on its roof would carry the decorative program skyward, where no critic could reach it.