Greater Romania existed on the map before it existed in a single unit of value. Until the National Bank of Romania leu replaced the crowns, the rubles, and the occupation lei, the country had shared borders and different measures of the same life. Monetary unification was not the swapping of one set of banknotes for another. It was the price, accounting, speculative, and at times fraudulent, of an identity that wanted to coincide with the territory.
The Great Union of 1918 created Greater Romania politically and territorially, but it did not instantly produce a Greater Romania in monetary terms. The territories that entered the Romanian state came with their own institutions, their own banking systems, their own commercial traditions, and, above all, with considerable quantities of cash issued in other monetary systems.
In the Old Kingdom the leu of the National Bank of Romania circulated. In the former Austro-Hungarian territories the Austro-Hungarian crown circulated. In Bessarabia various kinds of rubles from the Russian monetary space circulated, including imperial notes and revolutionary issues. In addition there was the problem of the lei issued by Banca Generală Română during the German occupation in the First World War.
What the Romanian state therefore had to do after 1918 was not a simple exchange of banknotes. It was an operation of monetary integration: it had to establish which money could still circulate, where it could circulate, at what value it would be recognized, on what terms it would be converted, and who would bear the cost of the gap between legal value and market value. The problem, however, had much older roots.
The Romanian lands were an international monetary space long before the national leu
The circulation of foreign coins in the Romanian space does not begin in 1918, nor even in the nineteenth century. In the Middle Ages and the early modern period, trade between the Romanian Principalities and the Ottoman, Central European, Polish, Russian, and Italian worlds made foreign coins ordinary.
Historical documents mention ducats, florins, aspers, groschen, rubles, and many other coins. Some were physical coins; others could also function as units of account. In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries monetary diversity was so great that the value of a transaction could be expressed in a unit of account different from the coin actually used in payment.
One of the more interesting stories is the very origin of the name “leu.” The name is tied to the Dutch lion thaler, the leeuwendaalder or löwenthaler, a coin that bore a lion. That coin circulated in the Romanian lands, and the name “leu” survived afterward as a unit of account, even after the physical coin itself had left circulation.
Only in 1867 did the leu become Romania’s official national currency.
The law of 1867 turns the leu into a technically defined national currency
The monetary law of 22 April / 4 May 1867 created Romania’s modern monetary system. The leu was defined as the monetary unit, divided into 100 bani, and the system was built in the spirit of the French monetary standard and the Latin Monetary Union.
Technically, 1 leu represented 5 grams of silver at a fineness of 835‰ or 0.3226 grams of gold at a fineness of 900‰. Romania thus defined its own monetary unit within a coherent European system, decimal and tied to the metallic standards of the age.
The reform mattered because it turned the “leu” from an old unit of account into a national currency proper. But the historical experience of foreign-coin circulation had not disappeared. It would return in a far more dramatic form after the First World War.
In 1918 Greater Romania inherits several monetary families
After 1918 the Romanian monetary space can be described through several families of banknotes.
The first was the NBR leu, the official currency of the Old Kingdom and the currency Romanian authorities intended to extend across Greater Romania.
The second was the leu of Banca Generală Română, issued during the German occupation. The fact that these notes were denominated in lei did not make them identical to NBR notes. They were issued by another institution and belonged to another monetary mechanism.
The third major category was the Austro-Hungarian crown, introduced in 1892 in place of the Austro-Hungarian florin and dominant in Transylvania, the Banat, Crișana, and Bukovina.
The fourth category was the Russian ruble, which itself has to be broken down. In circulation there were imperial notes of the Romanov period as well as issues that appeared after the 1917 revolution.
The popular formulation that Greater Romania had “four currencies” should therefore be understood as a simplification. If one counts monetary families and distinct issues, the reality was more complex.
The Banca Generală Română leu remains the currency of the German occupation
Banca Generală Română was a bank of German origin, established in Romania before the war (1895/1897). During the German occupation the occupying authorities decided to use it as the issuing institution for notes destined for occupied Romanian territory.
A correction is needed here against a formulation that is too simple, such as “uncovered lei.” The issuing documentation shows that BGR notes were tied to a cash deposit at the Reichsbank in Berlin, constituted in marks at the ratio of 80 marks for 100 lei issued. The issue therefore had an occupation-specific cover mechanism. The cover, however, was in depreciated marks, and from the NBR’s point of view it remained politically and economically fictitious: it should be described neither as an issue “with no mechanism at all” nor as a guarantee equivalent to the NBR leu.
The ordinance of Mackensen’s command of 18 January 1917 announced the notes’ entry into circulation. Numismatic cataloguing associates the issue mainly with the date 29 January 1917. The first provision stipulated denominations of 25 bani, 50 bani, 1 leu, 100 lei, and 1,000 lei. In the issues actually produced, the 2, 5, and 20 lei denominations also appeared. The 1917 BGR series thus comprises 25 bani, 50 bani, 1 leu, 2 lei, 5 lei, 20 lei, 100 lei, and 1,000 lei, printed in Berlin.
The printed volume is cited at around 2.17–2.28 billion lei. At stamping, about 1.1 billion lei were presented; at the final conversion, according to Krițescu, 1,463,546,396 BGR lei were withdrawn, at parity of 1:1 with the NBR leu.
These notes did not disappear immediately with the withdrawal of the German army. Some received stamps of local or Romanian authorities and continued to circulate in the transition period. The 1,000 lei BGR notes were withdrawn between June 1919 and September 1920. For the other denominations, withdrawal at parity begins on 1 November 1920 and ends between 1 February and 31 July 1921.
The Austro-Hungarian crown outlives the empire that issued it
At the breakup of Austria-Hungary the crown was still an extremely important currency. It had been introduced in 1892 and was divided into 100 subunits, called heller on the Austrian side and fillér on the Hungarian side.
The crown notes in circulation came from several issues of the Austro-Hungarian Bank. Numismatically the series is far richer than a simple list of the notes encountered in Romania after 1918 would suggest.
Before and during the war, notes of 10, 20, 50, 100, and 1,000 crowns circulated, and during the war smaller and larger values were also introduced. The 1916–1918 issues included 1 crown, 2 crowns, 25 crowns, 200 crowns, and 10,000 crowns.
For the Romanian territories the essential distinction is among the original Austro-Hungarian issue, the cash actually present in the provinces, and the specimens stamped by Romanian authorities. The stamping of 10 June–28 August 1919 mainly covered the values of 10, 20, 50, 100, and 1,000 crowns. The 10,000-crown note had a special conversion regime, after the window of 1–10 September 1920. The “white” issues of 25 and 200 crowns of the Károlyi government were not recognized by the Austro-Hungarian Bank and had no recognized circulating power in Transylvania.
Not every Austro-Hungarian note of every value should automatically be assumed to have been stamped and used in Romania.
The Romanov ruble remains the last great cash of the Russian Empire
The imperial ruble was a currency with a substantial banknote tradition. At the end of the Romanov period there were denominations of 1, 3, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, and 500 rubles.
The 1-ruble issue of 1898 belonged to the State Bank of the Russian Empire. The values of 3, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, and 500 rubles completed the main structure of imperial cash.
During the war the Russian monetary system changed rapidly. In 1915 emergency cash forms for small values were introduced, including for kopecks, in response to a shortage of metallic coin.
In 1917 the February Revolution removed the tsarist regime. The Provisional Government continued to use and issue certain types of notes from the previous system while introducing its own forms of cash.
“Lvov ruble” is a historical label, not the name of a personal issuer
In the Romanian monetary literature of the period, the rubles associated with the first revolutionary government are frequently called “Lvov rubles” (also Lwow / Lwoff), after Georgy Yevgenyevich Lvov, the first head of the Provisional Government. Romanian sources on monetary unification use this terminology and set it against “Romanov rubles.” The same notes are also known as Kerensky rubles.
Technically it is incorrect to understand the “Lvov ruble” as if Lvov had been the personal issuer of the notes. It is a historical designation for the category associated with the Provisional Government period.
In 1917 the Provisional Government issued, among other things, treasury notes of 20 and 40 rubles (kerenki). There were also notes of 250 and 1,000 rubles associated with the revolutionary period.
The Russian denominations of 1917 show a monetary structure in full deterioration
In the imperial system there were relatively small values such as 1, 3, 5, and 10 rubles, then 25, 50, 100, and 500 rubles. In 1917 very large denominations appeared, such as 250 and 1,000 rubles, and the Provisional Government also introduced notes of 20 and 40 rubles.
The rise in face values reflects the pressure of war, inflation, and the need for cash in an economy in which the purchasing power of the unit was changing rapidly. When these notes came to be converted into lei, Romanian authorities were not managing a neutral collection of foreign paper, but monetary masses that had come out of war, revolution, and a change of regime.
The crown rate must be distinguished from market quotations
One of the most frequent errors is to take all historical quotations of the crown and turn them into a single “rate.”
In the former Austro-Hungarian territories, administrative circulation used, from the entry of the Romanian army onward, the ratio of 1 leu for 2 crowns, that is 0.50 lei for one crown. The same ratio remained the official conversion rate from 1 September 1920.
These are not two different rates, but the same administrative parity, reconfirmed at the exchange.
The market could value the crown well below 0.50 lei. Contemporary sources indicate indicative quotations around 0.20–0.25 lei, and for the 10,000-crown notes the NBR also recorded drops toward about 0.15 lei. The gap between official and market created a strong incentive for speculation and explains part of the fraud associated with the operation.
Thus when we say “1 crown = 0.50 lei,” we are speaking of the official administrative and conversion rate, not of a constant market value in 1919–1920.
The ruble rate is read in lei per ruble, with Romanov above Lvov
In the case of the ruble the situation was still more complicated. The rate must be read as lei for one ruble, not mixed with the inverse formula “1 leu = X rubles.”
Conversion had two stages: the deposit of forms and rubles between 15 and 20 September 1920; withdrawal between 28 September and 8 October 1920.
The rate first announced was: 1 Romanov ruble = 1 leu; 1 Lvov/Kerensky ruble = 0.30 lei. The announcement provoked strong protests in Bessarabia. The government revised the scale.
The revised version retained in NBR syntheses was: for the first 5,000 rubles, 1.35 lei per Romanov ruble and 1 leu per Lvov ruble; then a regressive rate up to 60,000 rubles, with the Lvov ruble falling again toward 0.30 lei. The Romanov ruble remained, at every step, superior to the Lvov ruble. On the Bucharest market, before the operation, the NBR estimated about 0.80 lei for the Romanov and about 0.29 lei for the Lvov.
No published scale, tranche by tranche, for all intermediate intervals has been preserved in the reference syntheses. What is firmly attested are the threshold of the first 5,000, the ceiling of 60,000, the regressive character, and the hierarchy Romanov > Lvov.
A progressive or regressive rate is not accidental. It differentiated holders of small sums from those who presented large quantities. For an owner of a few hundred or a few thousand rubles, the rate determined the effective value of their savings after integration into Romania.
The scale of the operation is visible in the cash actually withdrawn
The reference figures, after Krițescu, also taken up in the SEEMHN/OeNB series, are as follows.
8,718,587,304 crowns were withdrawn, paid with 4,353,743,808 lei (at 0.50 lei). 640,006,502 Romanov rubles and 1,188,267,705 Lvov rubles were withdrawn, paid together with 1,208,701,217 lei. BGR notes withdrawn at parity totaled 1,463,546,396 lei. The total cost of the operation, according to the same source, is 7,025,991,421 lei. NBR syntheses often round to 7.079 billion lei. The order of magnitude is therefore 7.0–7.1 billion lei.
The usual roundings — 8.7 billion crowns, 4.4 billion lei, 640 million Romanov, 1.2 billion Lvov, 1.2 billion lei for rubles — are acceptable in a synthesis text, provided they are not treated as independent measurements.
These volumes must be read together with the 1919 stamping. At stamping about 3.5 billion crowns were found, against an initial estimate of about 1.5 billion. The gap up to 8.72 billion at the exchange is interpreted in the literature as an inflow, including a fraudulent one, of crowns between December 1918 and September 1920. The 8.7 billion are not the “natural stock” of the provinces in 1918.
The NBR report of 31 December 1920 (8.6 billion crowns withdrawn; 442.3 million Romanov rubles; 846.7 million Lvov rubles; of the ruble counterpart of 1.002 billion lei, 579.3 million had been paid) is an intermediate stage, not the final total.
Stamping precedes withdrawal and serves as a control filter
Before final withdrawal, Romanian authorities used stamping as an instrument of control.
Between 10 June and 28 August 1919 the notes of the Austro-Hungarian Bank and those of Banca Generală Română were stamped, with exceptions for small denominations. The aim was to limit the uncontrolled introduction of depreciated cash.
The procedure was a monetary filter. The state had to distinguish cash already inside the integrated territory from cash that could later be brought in from outside. The stamp was not a graphic detail: it could decide whether the note would be recognized at withdrawal.
1920 and 1921 are the moment when the parallel currencies begin to disappear
1920 is the central point, but the operation does not close in the autumn of that year.
The law for the withdrawal from circulation of crowns and rubles was published in the Official Gazette on 13 August 1920. For crowns, declarations were made between 20 and 24 August; the exchange proper, at 0.50 lei, between 1 September, 8:00 a.m., and 10 September 1920, 6:00 p.m. The 10,000-crown notes had a special regime after this window.
For rubles: deposit 15–20 September 1920; withdrawal 28 September–8 October 1920, with the Romanov/Lvov scale revised after protests.
For BGR: beginning on 1 November 1920, with the exception of the 1,000 lei denomination, already withdrawn; liquidation of the other denominations ends between 1 February and 31 July 1921.
The NBR retrospectively describes the 1920–1921 unification as the operation by which the Austro-Hungarian crown, the Romanov and Lvov rubles, and the BGR lei were exchanged for lei issued by the NBR.
Monetary unification was also an operation of national balance-sheet
If the state set an official rate higher than the market rate, holders benefited from the difference, and the cost entered the financial system. If, conversely, the official rate was below the value perceived by the population, holders considered themselves disadvantaged.
The conversion rate was not a neutral mathematical operation. It was a decision about the distribution of losses and gains.
In the case of the crown, the gap between market quotations (indicatively 0.15–0.25 lei) and 0.50 lei at conversion created a speculative incentive. Contemporary sources record fraud and forged stamps.
In the case of the ruble the problem was even more sensitive: the different rates for Romanov and Lvov and the regressive character directly affected the savings of the population in Bessarabia.
The NBR finances unification through an additional issue of lei
The convention between the NBR and the Ministry of Finance of 11 June 1920 provided for a loan of 5 billion lei, 60 percent cash and 40 percent treasury bills. The realized cost rose to about 7.0–7.1 billion lei, because the stock presented for exchange was far above the 1919 estimates. The two figures must not be confused: 5 billion is the agreed ceiling; 7 billion is the final bill.
The withdrawal of the old currencies had to be financed. The state needed lei to put in place of the crowns, the rubles, and the BGR lei.
This is one of the contradictions of the process: in order to create a single currency, Romania had to issue additional quantities of that currency. Unification simplified the legal and financial system, but it came with a significant monetary and fiscal cost.
Numismatics still preserves the traces of this transition
For the contemporary collector, the period 1917–1921 is interesting precisely because the notes preserve the traces of the transition.
A 20 lei BGR note of 1917 may appear with stamps applied later. An Austro-Hungarian note may bear the Romanian stamp that allowed it to circulate in territory administered by Romania. An imperial ruble belongs to the Romanov system; another Russian note from the same period may come from the Provisional Government.
In the case of BGR, cataloguing identifies the 1917 series from 25 bani to 1,000 lei, printed on watermarked paper; the stamps of 1918–1919 mark the stages before withdrawal.
In the case of the crown, differences among the issues of 1902, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1916, and 1918 indicate period and type; 25 and 200 crowns belong to wartime issues or unrecognized issues, not to the standard set stamped in 1919.
In the case of the ruble, 1, 3, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, and 500 belong to the imperial structure at the end of the Romanov period; 250 and 1,000 from 1917 and the notes of 20 and 40 belong to the revolutionary period.
The road from many currencies to a single leu has three steps
The monetary unification of 1920–1921 can be seen as a transformation in three steps.
In the first stage the state controlled the inherited money: stamping, territorial delimitation, administrative rates.
In the second stage it valued that money: 0.50 lei per crown, the differentiated Romanov/Lvov scale, the parity of the BGR leu.
In the third stage it actually withdrew the old cash and replaced it with NBR lei.
The process was neither instantaneous nor uniform. It involved negotiations, protests, speculation, forgeries, financial costs, and gaps between official value and market value.
The result sought was fundamental: the same monetary unit had to function in Bucharest, Cluj, Iași, Cernăuți, Chișinău, and the other integrated territories.
The unification of Greater Romania also had a monetary dimension
The Union of 1918 changed the borders. The monetary unification of 1920–1921 began to turn those borders into a single economic space.
Before the operation there circulated NBR notes, BGR notes, Austro-Hungarian crowns, imperial rubles, and rubles associated with the revolutionary period. Each had a different institutional origin and a value that did not automatically coincide with the leu.
The crown was taken officially at 0.50 lei. Romanov and Lvov rubles were valued in lei per ruble, with Romanov above Lvov: first 1.00 and 0.30 lei, then, after protests, 1.35 and 1.00 leu for the first 5,000, regressing up to 60,000. BGR notes were withdrawn at parity with the NBR leu. The aggregate bill was about 7.0–7.1 billion lei, of which 4,353,743,808 lei for crowns, 1,208,701,217 lei for rubles, and 1,463,546,396 lei for BGR.
Behind these figures was the process by which a country that had gathered territories from different empires tried to create a single unit of measure of value.
In 1918 Greater Romania had several monetary languages. In 1919 the state began to control them. In 1920 it began to convert them. In 1921 liquidation ended.
The result sought was simple in appearance and enormous in implication: from a Romania with several currencies, several issuing authorities, and several monetary histories there had to come a Romania in which the NBR leu would be the common currency of the entire territory.
That is the true economic dimension of monetary unification. It was not only the changing of some banknotes for others, but the transformation of a new political territory into a single monetary space.
