Funny Money from Yugoslavia - Lots of Zeros Before the War

Inspired by my recent post on Old Mexican Coins, I decided to continue this Funny Money series with some more old currency I remembered I still had. Today I want to present three banknotes of the Yugoslav Dinar, which befell a similar fate as the Mexican Peso, around the same time: Hyperinflation went rampant, so the central bank started issuing bills with higher and higher denomination. It didn't help the situation much, as the money was sliding further into worthlessness, despite all those zeros on the bills.

Vacationing on the Adriatic Sea

I think it must have been in the Summer of 1990, when my parents decided to go on a family vacation to Yugoslavia. The seaside was famously pretty, comparatively cheap, and not too far from where we lived. Of course no one could have known that a bloody civil war was about to break out, and I remember it all being very peaceful and pleasant. Except that they had some weird ways about their money...

I remember the confusion dealing with older and newer banknotes, and how one wouldn't know which was worth how much. The general rule of thumb was, if there were at least four zeros at the end, you had to ignore them. Oh, so that's how they fight inflation: ignoring zeros! Well, okay then. The work of a central bank can be so simple...

A Socialist's Dream

So let's take a close look at these banknotes, designed entirely according to socialist ideology. First of all, instead of famous leaders or other types of elites, the bills feature the faces of nameless every-day people. The 20,000 dinar bill bearing a miner, representing the working class hero, the 50,000 bill a woman, and the 100,000 one a young girl. It's noteworthy how there is increasing value on women and children!

Since I didn't want to base my post entirely on my own information, I looked at this source and found out that the miner on the 20,000 bill actually has a name: Alija Sirotanović who was a so called udarnik, a hard worker idealized by the communist party to be emulated by the general public. The woman and the girl, however, are just that: people that anyone could identify with.

On the back of each of these banknotes we can see images that may be relevant to the face on the front: The 20,000 bill features the wheel of a big mining machinery, used for strip-mining (great). The 50,000 dinar bears an image of Dubrovnik, one of the more picturesque towns on the Adriatic coast, where the lady on the front may live. Finally, the 100,000 note has some letters and numbers on it, which the girl is most likely exposed to at school.

Multi-Lingual Lettering

It's also interesting, how the multi-cultural makeup of Yugoslavia is also apparent on the banknotes. Everything is written in four languages, two in Latin letters, two in Cyrillic. Though I am not absolutely certain, I would guess the caption on the top-left, under the bill's denomination, to be in Serbian, the second one Croatian. Though the languages are virtually identical, the former uses Cyrillic script, and the great majority of the country spoke this language. (They still do, only the country doesn't exist any longer.) On the banknote, both spell DINARA.

The two languages on the bottom have to be therefor Slovene and Macedonian, the other two officially recognized languages of this multi-ethnic state. Slovene, while using Latin script, is actually a bit different from Serbo-Croatian, as is Macedonian, which uses Cyrillic letters.

Finally, I also want to mention the lettering along the left and right edges of the back of the bills: They list the six socialist republics making up the federal republic. These are Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, and Crna Gora (a.k.a. Montenegro).

The Aftermath: Many More Zeros Till the End

Even on our vacation I remember seeing a brand new 10 dinar bill that had the exact same girl on it as the 100,000 one. In fact, it was almost identical to it, only without the last four zeros. This alone was reason enough for me to seize these three bills (which didn't buy you much at that time already), knowing they were going out of style.

What I didn't know up until I checked this source today, is that in subsequent years the zeros kept coming like there's no tomorrow. In 1992 the bill with the same girl was worth 10,000 dinar. But apparently this was not enough, as in the same year she could be seen on a bill worth 5,000,000, and then again on the 1,000,000,000 banknote. Eventually in 1994 the Novi Dinar came out, a currency pegged to the Deutsche Mark. With this the hyperinflation was halted, but it was also the end of the dinar as such. Not much later, the entire country of Yugoslavia was history.

Visit the Previous Post in my Funny Money Series:

Mexico - Looking at Some Old Coins