500 Forint St. Stephen

Issued the year Hungary's communist government began its terminal unraveling, this coin commemorates St. Stephen I, the king who established the Hungarian state around 1000 AD and whose crown remains the central symbol of Hungarian nationhood to this day. The Hungarian National Bank's choice to celebrate a medieval Christian monarch while the ruling socialist apparatus was still nominally in power was not incidental — cultural and historical rehabilitation of pre-communist figures was already well underway by the late 1980s as the regime's ideological grip loosened.