Hanse ECU Wismar

The Hanse ECU series was a joint commemorative project among German Hanseatic cities in the mid-1990s, issued as the European Union debated the architecture of its coming single currency. Wismar, once one of the wealthiest Baltic trading ports in the entire Hanseatic League, had by 1995 spent nearly five decades in the GDR — its medieval harbour infrastructure largely intact but economically dormant. The ECU denomination itself was a ghost currency, never circulating as coin in everyday commerce anywhere in Europe.