1 Talonas Bond

The talonas was a deliberately temporary parallel currency, introduced in 1991 to ration Soviet rubles and ease Lithuania's exit from the ruble zone. By 1992, it had become the sole legal tender — a status nobody expected it to hold for long. The name itself comes from the Lithuanian word for coupon, which accurately reflects what it started as.

Printed domestically under austere conditions, the 1992 issues were produced with minimal security infrastructure. The watermark present on this note is modest by any professional printing standard, reflecting the limited facilities available to a newly independent state building a currency apparatus largely from scratch.

The litas replaced it in 1993.