25 Korun Jan Evangelista Purkyně

Issued to mark the 100th anniversary of Purkyně's death, this coin commemorates one of the most consequential figures in 19th-century physiology — the man who identified the Purkinje cell in the cerebellum, described the Purkinje effect in low-light vision, and coined the term "protoplasm." That a communist Czechoslovak state chose to honor him in 1969 is its own quiet irony: the Prague Spring had just been crushed by Soviet tanks the previous August, and cultural commemoratives were increasingly used to redirect public attention toward safely distant national heroes.