2½ Euro - Schiedam de Vrijheid

Schiedam's "de Vrijheid" — Freedom — was one of the rhedekamers, the chambers of rhetoric that functioned as civic literary societies in the Low Countries from the fifteenth century onward. The 1998 Dutch 2½ Euro issues in this series were struck ahead of the euro cash changeover, a final assertion of Dutch cultural identity through coinage before the guilder's retirement in 2002.