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Archives for January 17th, 2006
Slovenia’s proposed 2-euro coin, featuring a cloud and writing.
The Financial Times reported on Sunday that Slovenia is the only EU newcomer that "looks certain to join the single currency area on its target date of January 1, 2007… while question marks hang over the two Baltic candidates." (Lithuania and Estonia)
It would seem that the cat is in the bag. And although I’m looking forward to using the euro, I’m not looking forward to looking at them. If you haven’t seen them already, Slovenia’s euro-coin designs are here. Some people already hate them with a fiery passion, and I must say I don’t blame them. Not only because they don’t look anything like what I was hoping for, but because they seem cluttered, clumsy and outdated. I’ve always liked the current coins and bills — not to mention the all-too-beautiful stamps. Slovenia has always been consistently good at this stuff. It just didn’t seem to work out this time, unfortunately.
The biggest problem with them, I think, is that they’re just too busy. If you look at some of the other designs, you’ll notice that they rarely have any inscriptions beyond the name of the country (sometimes) and maybe the name of the person. The Slovenian coins, by contrast, are jammed full of sentences, explanations and slogans all over the place: "Stati inu obstati," "Katedrala svobode," "lipicanec," the first verse of the national anthem, and Oj Triglav, moj dom — the title of an old patriotic poem. To make matters worse, "Slovenija" is written on all of them, but interspersed with stars so that it’s difficult to read. The one-euro coin, for example, looks like a bowl of alphabet soup, with stars. Don’t get me wrong, they’re nowhere near as bad as those from Holland or Luxembourg. I just think they could’ve put together something much, much better looking.
That said, here are some interesting tidbits about the coins:
1) The prince’s stone on the two-cent piece is actually in Austria. This caused some conniption fits in Klagenfurt and the Carinthian state government officially protested. (They were ignored.)
2) The cathedral of freedom on the 10-cent piece also isn’t in Slovenia. It was never built.
3) The horses on the 20-cent piece are another sore point for Austria, since the horses are closely linked to Vienna’s famous Spanish Riding School.
