Issued in circulation on November 1, 2004.
Midas or King Midas is popularly remembered for his ability to turn everything he touched into gold: the Midas touch.
Midas was king of Pessinus, a city of Phrygia, who as a child was adopted by the king Gordias and Cybele, the goddess whose consort he was, and who (by some accounts) was the goddess-mother of Midas himself. Some accounts place the youth of Midas in Macedonian Bermion (See Bryges) In Thracian Mygdonia, Midas was known for his garden of roses: Herodotus remarks on the settlement of the ancient kings of Macedon on the slopes of Mount Bermion "the place called the garden of Midas son of Gordias, where roses grow of themselves, each bearing sixty blossoms and of surpassing fragrance". In this garden, according to Macedonians, Silenos was taken captive. According to Iliad (V.860) , he had one son, Lityerses, the demonic reaper of men, but in some variations of the myth he had a daughter, Zoë or "life" instead.