5000 Dinara Mediterranean Games

Yugoslavia hosted the Mediterranean Games in Split in 1979, the first time the event was held in a socialist country. The organizing committee pushed hard for commemorative gold issues partly as hard currency earners — Yugoslavia's chronic balance-of-payments problems made foreign-exchange-generating numismatic exports a genuine economic tool, not an afterthought.

The .900 fineness places this outside the standard fine gold (.999) issues more familiar to modern collectors, a deliberate continuity with pre-war European coin traditions that Yugoslav state mints maintained through this period.