20 Euro August Šenoa

August Šenoa dominated Croatian literary life from the 1860s until his death in 1881 so thoroughly that the period is simply called "the Šenoa era" in Croatian literary historiography. He effectively built the modern Croatian reading public almost single-handedly — editing Vijenac, the leading cultural journal, while simultaneously writing the serialized historical novels that gave Croatians a vernacular prose tradition at a moment when the language itself was still being standardized under the Illyrian Movement's long shadow.

The 2026 issue marks the 185th anniversary of his birth.