100 Lei Mihai Eminescu

Issued to mark the 150th anniversary of Eminescu's birth, this coin commemorates Romania and Moldova's shared claim to the poet — a claim that sits at the center of a long-running dispute over Moldovan national identity, in which Bucharest and Chișinău have periodically contested whether Moldovans constitute a distinct people or a branch of the Romanian nation. The National Bank of Moldova's decision to feature Eminescu was itself a cultural and political statement in that debate.