20 ECU Johan Ludvig Runeberg

Johan Ludvig Runeberg, Finland's national poet, had been dead for over a century by the time this coin was struck — his 190th birth anniversary fell in 1994, making the 1995 issue a slight calendrical lag typical of commemorative planning cycles. The ECU denomination is the curiosity here: Finland had not yet joined the eurozone, and these ECU-denominated pieces were issued into a collector market rather than circulation, riding the wave of pre-euro commemorative ECU coinage that several European nations exploited through the early 1990s. Finland joined the EU in January 1995, the same year this piece was minted.