500 Schilling Festung Kufstein

Kufstein fortress, perched above the Inn River in Tyrol, spent much of its medieval history as a Bavarian stronghold rather than an Austrian one — it only passed definitively to the Habsburgs in 1504 following the War of the Bavarian Succession. The fortress's Kaiserturm, built by Emperor Maximilian I after that acquisition, housed political prisoners well into the nineteenth century, among them the Tyrolean revolutionary Andreas Hofer's associates following the failed 1809 uprising against Napoleonic-allied Bavaria.

This coin belongs to Austria's long-running commemorative silver Schilling series, which concluded with the country's euro adoption in 2002, making 2001 issues among the final strikes in that denominational lineage.