500 Marka

Estonia's postwar monetary system was built almost from scratch after independence in 1918, with the marka serving as the transitional currency before the kroon replaced it in 1928 at a rate of 100 marka to 1 kroon — a ratio that tells you everything about what inflation did to purchasing power in the intervening years. This 500 marka denomination was printed domestically at a time when Estonian printing infrastructure was still being established, which accounts for the relatively plain production compared to contemporaneous issues from Western European security printers.

The guilloche underprint is the primary counterfeit deterrent — there are no watermark or serial complexity features that would become standard in later Estonian issues.