5 Markkaa, Litt. A 1918

This note was printed in 1909 but issued under the "Litt. A 1918" designation, reflecting the Bank of Finland's practice of assigning letter suffixes to distinguish emission batches within the same series — a bureaucratic holdover from the period when Finland operated under Russian imperial monetary authority. The 1918 suffix is significant: Finland had just emerged from a brutal civil war, and the Bank needed to rapidly authenticate circulating stocks to separate legitimate currency from forgeries and competing issues that had proliferated during the conflict.

The Litt. system also helped manage the redemption process as Finland moved to consolidate its monetary independence following the declaration of sovereignty in December 1917.