2 Euros Lithuanian Multipart Songs

This coin was issued to mark Lithuania's "Sutartinės" — ancient polyphonic folk songs inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2010. Sutartinės are among the oldest surviving forms of polyphony in Europe, built on deliberate dissonance rather than harmony, a structural feature that sets them apart from virtually every other folk tradition on the continent. The practice had nearly died out by the mid-20th century before systematic ethnographic collection efforts in the Dzūkija and Aukštaitija regions pulled it back from near-extinction.