5 Manat

Robert Kalina is best known as the designer of the euro banknotes — his selection by the Central Bank of Azerbaijan to design this series was a deliberate choice, not a routine tender. The same hand that produced the abstract architectural motifs for the eurozone produced the artwork here, though working within an entirely different symbolic vocabulary.

OeBS in Vienna has printed currency for dozens of issuing authorities outside Europe, and Azerbaijan has been a consistent client across multiple series. The P#32 watermark-only security specification is notably lean for a note of this period, when multi-feature security packages had become routine.