Inače, kovanica od 2,5 ojra se prodaje za 6 ojra

Napoleon Bonaparte was forced into exile after his grand European ambitions were crushed by the armies of the Duke of Wellington and Gebhard von Blücher at the Battle of Waterloo, which took place on what is now the outskirts of Brussels.

France had said in its initial letter to Belgium that the battle, on 18 June 1815, “has a particular resonance in the collective consciousness that goes beyond a simple military conflict”.

Euro coin row: France wins the battle, Belgium wins the war

Name: The €2.50 coin.

Age: One week old, but 200 years in the making.

Appearance: Possibly the funniest thing that Belgium has ever done.

Is Belgium a particularly funny country? Oh, the funniest. The closest thing it has to a national emblem is a statue of a little boy having a wee. Belgium is the greatest.

And this coin is somehow funnier than a weeing boy? What’s on it, a pooing monkey? Better than that: a lion on a plinth.

Ha ha… ha? It’s to commemorate the bicentennial anniversary of the battle of Waterloo, stupid.

I’m still not entirely sure where the humour lies in this. So, three months ago, Belgium proposed the introduction of a commemorative Waterloo €2 coin. But, because it represented the country’s most humiliating military defeat, France vetoed it.

But this isn’t about a €2 coin. Exactly. Instead of giving up, Belgium went away and found an obscure law stating that any country in the eurozone could issue any new coins it wanted, providing they’re in an irregular denomination. So it invented a €2.5 coin, and minted 70,000 of those to commemorate Waterloo instead.

So all this is just a hopelessly convoluted way for Belgium to stick it to France? Exactly. It’s like Scotland printing up a £7.50 note plastered with the crying faces of all its ousted Labour MPs.

That is actually kind of brilliant, isn’t it? All of Belgium is great. It went 18 months without a government once, plus it invented roller skates, pralines and saxophones. Belgium is the country all other countries aspire to be.

How has France taken this? To be fair, incredibly sanguinely. However, this year is also the 500th anniversary of the French victory at Marignano, and Italy recently was among the nations which similarly vetoed plans for a commemorative €2 coin.

Are you suggesting that France will copy Belgium and make a €2.50 coin specifically to annoy Italy? It’s not definite but, by God, I hope so.

This is fun, eh? It is. And it will be, right up until someone makes a €2.50 Bayeux tapestry coin.

Do say: “I knew money would tear Europe apart, but not like this.”

Don’t say: “Still, at least that’s Europe’s biggest problem solved.”

Waterloo (Russian: Ватерлоо) is a 1970 Soviet-Italian film directed by Sergei Bondarchuk and produced by Dino De Laurentiis. It depicts the story of the preliminary events and the Battle of Waterloo, and is famous for its lavish battle scenes.

It stars Rod Steiger as Napoleon Bonaparte and Christopher Plummer as the Duke of Wellington with a cameo by Orson Welles as Louis XVIII of France. Other stars include Jack Hawkins as General Thomas Picton, Virginia McKenna as the Duchess of Richmond and Dan O'Herlihy as Marshal Ney.

The film includes some 15,000 Soviet foot soldiers and 2,000 cavalrymen as extras—it was said that, during its making, director Sergei Bondarchuk was in command of the seventh largest army in the world. Fifty circus stunt riders were used to perform the dangerous horse falls. These numbers brought an epic quality to the battle scenes.

Columbia Pictures published a 28-page, full-colour pictorial guide when it released Waterloo in 1970. According to the guidebook, Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis had difficulty finding financial backers for the massive undertaking until he finally began talks with the Russians in the late 1960s and reached agreement with the Mosfilm organization. Final costs were over £12 million (UK) (equivalent to about US $38.3 million in 1970), making Waterloo, for its time, one of the most expensive movies ever made. Had the movie been filmed in the West, costs might have been as much as three times this. Mosfilm contributed more than £4 million of the costs, nearly 16,000 soldiers of the Soviet Army, a full brigade of Soviet cavalry, and a host of engineers and labourers to prepare the battlefield in the rolling farmland outside Uzhhorod, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union).

To recreate the battlefield authentically, the Russians bulldozed away two hills, laid five miles of roads, transplanted 5,000 trees, sowed fields of rye, barley and wildflowers and reconstructed four historic buildings. To create the mud, more than six miles of underground irrigation piping was specially laid. Most of the battle scenes were filmed using five Panavision cameras simultaneously—from ground level, from 100 foot towers, from a helicopter, and from an overhead railway built right across the location.

Months before the cameras started filming, the 16,000 Soviet Army soldiers began training to learn 1815 drill and battle formations, as well as the use of sabres, bayonets and handling cannon. A selected 2,000 additional men were also taught to load and fire muskets. This army lived in a large encampment next to the battlefield. Each day after breakfast, they marched to a large wardrobe building, donned their French, British or Prussian uniforms and fifteen minutes later were in position. The soldiers were commanded by officers who took orders from director Sergei Bondarchuk by walkie-talkie. To assist in the direction of this huge, multi-national undertaking, the Russian director had four interpreters permanently at his side: one each for English, Italian, French and Serbo-Croatian.

A ovakvi klipovi im ne smetaju...



Veličanstveno.

Tragično.

Ne ponovilo se.

Na prostoru našeg kontinenta sam mislio.