Catalog
See full images - free registration
Continue with Google - no registration!
or register with email
Why register? Just to keep bots out of our catalog. Your email stays private - we will never share it or send you anything uninvited. We guarantee you that!
20 Leva
| Issuer | Bulgarian National Bank |
|---|---|
| Year | 1991 |
| Type | Log in to see details |
| Value | Log in to see details |
| Currency | Log in to see details |
| Composition | Log in to see details |
| Size | Log in to see details |
| Shape | Log in to see details |
| Printer | Log in to see details |
| Designer(s) | Log in to see details |
| Engraver(s) | Log in to see details |
| In circulation to | 31 July 1998 |
| Reference(s) | Log in to see details |
| Obverse description | At centre, a vignette based on a Boyana Church fresco portraying Desislava, sebastocratorina and ktitorissa, rendered in a warm, stylised palette evoking medieval Bulgarian iconographic art. Cyrillic inscriptions identifying the subject and the issuing bank frame the central image, with decorative guilloche underprint elements in the background. The denomination appears in Cyrillic script. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | Log in to see details |
| Reverse description | Log in to see details |
| Reverse lettering | Log in to see details |
| Signature(s) | Log in to see details |
| Protection type | Watermark |
| Protection description | Log in to see details |
| Variants | Log in to see details |
| Comments |
Bulgaria's communist-era banknote series was still rolling off the same Leipzig presses after 1989 — this 1991 issue is a product of that institutional inertia, printed at the same East German facility that had supplied Bulgarian notes through the entire late socialist period. The Wertpapierdruckerei in Leipzig continued fulfilling existing contracts into the early post-unification years, which makes this note something of a Cold War afterthought.
It was superseded quickly. Hyperinflationary pressure through the early 1990s eroded the lev's purchasing power so rapidly that this denomination became functionally worthless within a few years of issue.