10 Drachmes new lettering

The shift to new lettering on this type reflects a broader standardization effort by the Bank of Greece in the early 1980s, aligning coin typography with modern Greek orthography following the official abolition of polytonic script in 1982 — the same year this variant entered circulation. Greece's switch to the monotonic system was a political as much as linguistic decision, pushed through by the PASOK government under Andreas Papandreou. The drachma itself would survive only another two decades before eurozone accession rendered the entire series obsolete in 2002.