200 Korún Ján Smrek

Ján Smrek — pen name of Ján Čietek — was the leading voice of Slovak interwar vitalism, a literary movement that pushed back hard against the ruralist sentimentalism dominating Slovak poetry in the early twentieth century. This 1998 issue marks the centenary of his birth. Slovakia had only re-established its independent central bank five years earlier following the Velvet Divorce, and the commemorative silver program of the mid-to-late 1990s was in part a deliberate project of national cultural identity-building through coinage.