0 Euro - Janko Král'

The zero-euro souvenir note program, administered by the EECB and printed by Oberthur Fiduciaire, occupies a peculiar legal niche — these notes are technically denominated currency of the Eurosystem but carry no redemption value, a status the European Central Bank has tacitly permitted since the first issues appeared around 2015.

Janko Kráľ was a nineteenth-century Slovak Romantic poet and political agitator, jailed in 1848 for inciting peasant revolt during the revolutionary upheavals that swept Habsburg lands. An appropriate subject for a note worth nothing — he spent much of his life similarly unrewarded by the institutions of his time.