500 Lei Anghel Saligny

Anghel Saligny engineered the Cernavodă Bridge over the Danube, completed in 1895 — at the time, the longest bridge in Europe and a genuine feat of late 19th-century structural engineering. Romania issued this coin in 2004 as part of a broader commemorative silver program honoring national technical and cultural figures, a series that ran through the early 2000s with relatively modest mintages aimed squarely at the collector market rather than circulation.