100 Manat

Robert Kalina is best known for designing the entire euro banknote series — his selection by the Azerbaijani National Bank to design the 2005 manat family was a deliberate signal of ambition for a currency that had been redenominated at 5,000 old manat to one new manat just that year. The redenomination, effective January 2006, was partly cosmetic — a way of shedding the inflationary arithmetic left over from the early post-Soviet collapse — but the new notes were genuinely engineered to a higher security specification than anything Azerbaijan had previously issued.

OeBS in Vienna has printed for dozens of central banks, but the pairing with Kalina gave this series an unusual degree of design coherence across denominations.