400 Kruna overprint on 100 Dinara

When the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was proclaimed in December 1918, it inherited a monetary patchwork — Serbian dinara, Austro-Hungarian kronen, and various occupation currencies all circulating simultaneously across territories that had never shared a common economy. This note addresses that problem directly: rather than printing new stock, the Ministry of Finance overstamped existing French-printed 100 Dinara notes with a 400 Kruna value, creating a temporary bridge instrument for the newly incorporated Slovenian and Croatian territories where krone-based pricing was still the daily reality.

The underlying Banque de France plate — engraved by Massey, designed under Harang's direction — was already in use for Serbian state purposes before the war ended. The overprint repurposed it wholesale, which made fiscal sense but produced a note whose face value bore no logical relationship to its printed denomination by conventional reckoning.