2 Hryvni Dmytro Lutsenko

Dmytro Lutsenko (1821–1879) was a Ukrainian poet and ethnographer whose work documenting folk songs and oral traditions placed him within the broader national cultural revival that Ukrainian intellectuals pursued under Russian imperial censorship — a movement the tsarist authorities increasingly suppressed following the Ems Decree of 1876, which banned Ukrainian-language publishing outright. This coin was issued three decades after Ukrainian independence, as the National Bank worked through an extensive commemorative program honoring figures who had been systematically erased or marginalized during the Soviet period.