5000 Schilling Maria von Ebner-Eschenbach

Austria's highest-denomination banknote when issued, the 5000 Schilling was also one of the last major notes produced before the country committed fully to the euro transition process. The ONB printed this series in-house at their Vienna facility — unusual among central European banks of the period, most of whom contracted Giesecke & Devrient or De La Rue for high-value work.

Maria von Ebner-Eschenbach, the Moravian-born author honored here, was chosen partly to correct a long-standing gender imbalance in Austrian note portraiture. The holographic foil patch was among the more sophisticated domestic implementations of that technology in the mid-1990s Schilling series.