20 Schilling Hochosterwitz Castle

Hochosterwitz, perched on a 160-meter dolomite outcrop in Carinthia, was one of the few Styrian strongholds never taken by force — a fact that informed the Austrian Treasury's choice of subject during a decade when the 20-Schilling denomination cycled through a rotating series of architectural types. The castle's 1586 ring of fourteen successive gatehouses, commissioned by Georg Khevenhüller as a defense against Ottoman incursion, made it an unusually loaded symbol for a coin issued through the tail end of the Cold War.