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Greek 50 cent coins
The poorest member of the EU, Greece saw EMU as an essential step towards achieving its strategic and economic ambitions. In spite of the euro's weakness when Greece entered the euro-zone on January 1 2001, opinion polls showed that some 70 per cent of Greeks were in favour of membership. There was little attachment to the drachma, as europe's second-oldest currency was linked in Greek minds with economic and political backwardness. Greece leveraged the euro to encourage foreign direct investment with a view to the country becoming a business and transport hub, linking south-east Europe with EU markets.
All designs feature the 12 stars of the EU, the year of imprint and a tiny symbol of the Bank of Greece (the anthemion flower). Uniquely, the value of the coins is expressed on the national side in the Greek alphabet, as well as being on the common side in the Roman alphabet. The euro cent is known as the lepto (plural lepta) in Greek, in reference to the former currency, the drachma, which was divided into 100 lepta.
Greece did not enter the eurozone until 2001 and was not able to start minting coins as early as the other eleven member states, so a number of coins circulated in 2002 were not minted in Athens but in Finland (€1 and €2 - mint mark S = Suomi), France (1c, 2c, 5c, 10c and 50c - mint mark F) and Spain (20c - mint mark E = Espana). The coins minted in Athens for the Euro introduction in 2002 as well as all the subsequent Greek euro coins do not carry any mint mark.
The following 50 cent coins have circulated in Greece since the introduction of the Common European Currency on January 1, 2002:
  | 50 cents - Eleytherios Venizelos Eleytherios Venizelos (1864-1936), one of the most prominent political figures in Hellas. He was a pioneer in social reform, a renowned diplomat and played a key role in modernising the Greek state and the victorious military campaigns of 1912-1920, liberating Northern Greece and the Aegean islands. He was elected 7 times as the Prime Minister. ...
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The size of the images above are related to the diameter of the coins they represent.
