1 Lepton

The United States of the Ionian Islands was a British protectorate established by the Treaty of Paris in 1815 — nominally self-governing, practically administered from London. This 1821 copper issue was struck at the Heaton Mint in Birmingham, a detail that quietly underscores just how thin the fiction of Ionian independence actually was.

The lepton was the smallest denomination in the Ionian decimal system introduced under British oversight, one of the earlier decimal coinage structures imposed on a Mediterranean territory.