2 Euros Battle of Thermopylae

Issued to mark the 2,500th anniversary of the battle, this coin arrived in a year already complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted distribution across the eurozone. The battle itself — fought in 480 BC during Xerxes I's invasion of Greece — has accumulated so much mythology over the centuries that the historical record, including Herodotus's own inflated casualty figures, is almost impossible to disentangle from the legend. Greece has leaned hard into the Thermopylae narrative as a founding story of Western resistance, a framing that remains politically loaded to this day.