1000 Lei Union of Basarabia with Romania

The union commemorated here — the 1918 incorporation of Bessarabia into Romania following the collapse of the Russian Empire — remained politically toxic in Soviet Moldova and was officially suppressed as a historical event for decades. When Moldova declared independence in 1991, the question of whether 1918 represented liberation or annexation became immediately contested again. That the National Bank of Chișinău issued this coin at the centenary says something about where official historiography had landed by 2018, even as the political argument remained very much alive domestically.