10 Lei Peles Palace

Peleș Castle was completed in 1883 as a summer residence for Carol I, the first king of Romania under the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen dynasty. Construction ran for nearly a decade under architect Wilhelm Doderer, with subsequent phases continuing into the early twentieth century. Carol reportedly supervised design decisions personally, resulting in an unusually eclectic German Neo-Renaissance structure that sat conspicuously at odds with its Carpathian surroundings.

The castle's post-WWII fate was grim: nationalized by the communist regime in 1948, stripped of much of its collection, and intermittently closed to Carol's descendants for decades. A protracted ownership dispute between the Romanian state and the Hohenzollern heirs was still unresolved when this coin was issued.