Catalog
500 Lei COA with crown
| Issuer | Banca Națională a României |
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| Year | 2022 |
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| Composition | Log in to see details |
| Size | 153 × 82 mm |
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| Obverse description | Central vignette of poet Mihai Eminescu (1850–1889) to the right, accompanied by lime tree leaves and blossoms (Tilia platyphyllos), an ink pot and quill as symbolic attributes. The coat of arms of Romania and the BNR logo appear alongside the bank's full name, with the denomination rendered in both numerals and words; authorized signatures of the Governor and Chief Cashier appear at lower left and right respectively. Issue date reads 1 ianuarie 2018. |
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| Obverse lettering | Log in to see details |
| Reverse description | Central architectural vignette of the Iași University Library, accompanied by a reproduction of a page from the Timpul newspaper. The denomination appears in numerals and words, with the BNR logo in the upper right and lower left corners and the bank's full name across the top. The serial number is printed vertically in black ink on the left side and horizontally in red ink on the right; the legal anti-counterfeiting notice is inscribed along the lower margin. |
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| Comments |
Romania's 500 Lei polymer series has been in continuous production since 2005, with the P#123 family accumulating suffix variants as the note underwent incremental security upgrades rather than full redesigns. The "c" suffix typically reflects changes to security thread specification or substrate supplier — neither publicly detailed by BNR — making precise attribution between variants difficult without side-by-side comparison under UV.
Polymer adoption by BNR predated most Western European central banks by over a decade, driven partly by the catastrophic counterfeiting problems that plagued the pre-denomination leu series in the late 1990s.