100 Lei Alexei Mateevici

Alexei Mateevici died in August 1917 at twenty-six, a Romanian Orthodox priest and poet who had been conscripted into the Russian Imperial Army as a military chaplain. His poem Limba Noastră — written that same year — later became Moldova's national anthem, making him the only person whose work forms the lyrical foundation of a state he never lived to see exist. This gold issue marks the centenary of both the poem and his death.