Results of the rerun public competition for the design of a €10 silver collector coin commemorating the 100th anniversary of Comenius University in Bratislava

First prize and the design selected for the coin
Patrik Kovačovský

Reduced second prize
Patrik Kovačovský

Reduced second prize
Mária Poldaufová

In April 2018 Národná banka Slovenska (NBS) announced a public competition for the design of a €10 silver collector coin to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Comenius University in Bratislava.

After the designs were evaluated anonymously by NBS’s Committee for the Assessment of Commemorative and Collector Coin Designs, the NBS Bank Board opted to set aside the Committee’s recommendation and not to select any of the designs for the coin. It decided that the competition would be rerun, and the new competition was announced in early August 2018. Special invitations to take part were extended to the designers of the four coins highest placed in the first competition.

A total of ten designs by seven different designers were entered in the competition. Four of the designs were submitted by the specially invited designers: Patrik Kovačovský (with two entries), Mária Poldaufová and Peter Valach. In September 2018 the Committee anonymously evaluated the designs and it was assisted in this task by two expert advisers: Dr Ľubica Kázmerová from the Institute of History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, and Dr Vincent Múcska from Comenius University.

On the Committee’s recommendation, the Bank Board awarded first prize to a design by Patrik Kovačovský and approved it for the coin. In the Committee’s unanimous view, this design best captured the importance of Comenius University as the first national university in Slovakia. Some symbols which had appeared in the design entered by Mr Kovačovský in the first competition and which the Committee had described as ambiguous were left out of the new design.

Mr Kovačovský was also awarded a reduced second prize. The common provenance of this design and the winning design was evident from the way in which the same symbols featured in each of them. A visual difference in the second design was the greater prominence given to script elements.

Another reduced second prize went to the design by Mária Poldaufová, which featured a symbolic representation of the university’s first four faculties, set within a square frame.

No third prize was awarded.

An additional prize was awarded to Vladimír Pavlica for the high quality of his design.