1½ Euros ANBO aircraft

The ANBO series of aircraft were designed by Antanas Gustaitis, a Lithuanian military engineer and pilot who built the country's first domestically produced aircraft program almost entirely through institutional stubbornness — working against chronic underfunding and political indifference throughout the 1930s. The ANBO-41, among the most capable of the line, was still in service when the Soviet occupation of June 1940 rendered the Lithuanian Air Force instantly obsolete. Most of the aircraft were absorbed or scrapped within months.

Lithuania's 1.5 euro collector series has become a vehicle for recovering precisely this kind of interwar technical achievement from obscurity.