100 Lei Grigore Vieru

Grigore Vieru, the Moldovan poet commemorated here, died in January 2009 from injuries sustained in a car accident — less than two years before this coin was issued. The speed of the tribute reflects the intensity of public mourning; Vieru was not merely a literary figure but a central voice in the Romanian-language cultural identity movement in Soviet and post-Soviet Moldova, where the status of the language itself remained a contested political question for decades.