1000 Forint Zoltán Kodály

Issued on the centenary of Kodály's birth, this large gold piece belongs to a series of prestige commemoratives the Hungarian state mint produced through the 1960s primarily for hard currency export — pieces that were never intended to circulate and were sold directly to Western collectors and foreign exchange dealers. Kodály himself was still alive in 1967, dying in March of that year at age 84, which gave the centenary issue an accidental memorial quality its planners had not anticipated.