One of the world’s leading opera, theatre and classical music festivals, the Salzburg Festival celebrates its centenary in 2020. Featuring opera, theatre and classical concerts, the Salzburg Festival offers a broader spectrum of cultural variety than any other. To celebrate this major cultural event, which is constantly in the process of reinventing itself, we have come up with a particularly innovative coin design.

No other metal has as much symbolic meaning as gold. The six-piece 100 euro Magic of Gold series traces that meaning through different ancient cultures. The first of those cultures is Mesopotamia, ‘the land between two rivers’, the Tigris and the Euphrates, where some of the most important developments in early human history occurred.

Reaching for the Sky celebrates the story of manned flight, from the first fearless pioneers to the crowded skies of today. The Advent of Powered Flight, the second coin in the series, celebrates the pioneers of powered aviation, including Igo Etrich, who broke records in 1910 by flying for 140km across northern Austria, and Charles Lindbergh, who became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1927.

Godfrey of Bouillon was one of the leaders of the First Crusade. Considered a chaste and daring knight whose victories were romanticised during his lifetime, Godfrey epitomised the spirit of adventure, the theme of the superb second coin in the swashbuckling Knights' Tales series, in which we travel back in time to a bygone age of knightly virtues.