5000 Tolarjev Žiga Zois

Žiga Zois (1747–1819) was Ljubljana-born but educated in Vienna, and used his inherited mining fortune to fund a salon that became the intellectual engine of the Slovenian national awakening — hosting linguists, botanists, and poets at a moment when Slovenian as a written literary language was still being invented. His patronage of Jernej Kopitar and Valentin Vodnik was instrumental in establishing the philological groundwork that later movements built upon. This coin was issued in the first years following Slovenian independence, when the Tolar itself was still a young currency, introduced only in 1991 after the ten-day war of secession from Yugoslavia.