Estonia

2020

Commemorative coin

The bicentenary of the discovery of Antarctica

Official Journal of the European Union

The discovery is linked to Estonia because one of the first men to see Antarctica in 1820 was Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, a Baltic German seafarer born in Saaremaa, who documented the discovery. The design depicts a motif of a sailing ship. It also bear the inscriptions ‘Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen’ and ‘ANTARKTIKA 200’, the country name ‘EESTI’ and the year of issuance ‘2020’. The coin’s outer ring depicts the 12 stars of the European flag.

Additional information

Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen (1778-1852) served in the Imperial Russian Navy. In 1819 he was assigned to lead the first Russian expedition to the Southern Polar region initiated by Tsar Alexander I. During the two-year expedition, which he led as captain of the corvette "Vostok", 29 new islands in the Pacific and Atlantic were discovered. Bellingshausen gained the reputation of being the discoverer of Antarctica because he first sighted the ice shelf surrounding it on 28 January 1820 and then circumnavigated and mapped the "ice continent". The edge of the Antarctic ice shelf is shown on the right in front of the bow of the three-master sailing under the Russian naval flag.

Edge lettering

Designer