50 Syrian Pounds

Robert Kalina is best known for designing the entire euro banknote series adopted in 2002, making his involvement here an unusual assignment — a staff designer at the Oesterreichische Nationalbank producing notes for a foreign central bank through the OeBS printing arm. The arrangement was not uncommon for OeBS, which has supplied security printing services to numerous Middle Eastern states.

The 2009 issue date places the first printing just two years before the Syrian civil war began in 2011. The series remained nominally valid through 2021, though by that point the Syrian pound had lost the overwhelming majority of its exchange value through sanctions, monetary financing of the conflict, and near-total collapse of foreign reserves.