5 Hryven Ivan Franko

Ivan Franko (1856–1916) was a Galician writer, poet, and political activist who spent much of his adult life under Austrian imperial rule and was imprisoned multiple times for socialist organizing — making him a complicated but potent national symbol for independent Ukraine. This 2006 issue commemorates the 150th anniversary of his birth. Franko wrote in Ukrainian at a time when the language itself was politically suppressed in Russian-controlled territories under the Ems Decree, an act that makes his adoption on Ukrainian coinage after 1991 carry considerable ideological weight.