100 Euros

The 2002 euro banknotes were the product of a single centralized design competition won by Robert Kalina of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank — a deliberate choice, since the imagery had to belong to no specific member state. The architectural motifs are composites: plausible but fictional, drawn from real European styles without depicting any actual building. This was politically necessary and aesthetically contentious.

Production was split across multiple national central bank printing works simultaneously, each identified by a printer's code on the finished note. The ECB absorbed this series into a coordinated "first series" designation once the Europa series began replacing individual denominations from 2013 onward.