20 Heller Parz

Parz is a small village in Upper Austria — a Gemeinde so minor it barely registers in regional histories. The 20 Heller note it issued in 1920 belongs to the vast wave of Austrian municipal Notgeld that flooded the country after the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy left small communities without adequate small change. The new Republic had more urgent problems than supplying coins to villages of a few hundred people, so local authorities simply printed their own.

The Jaksch catalogue documents hundreds of these Upper Austrian issues, many surviving in quantity because collectors snapped them up as novelties at the time of issue — which means genuine circulation wear is actually the harder find.