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500 Litu
| Issuer | Lietuvos Bankas (Bank of Lithuania) |
|---|---|
| Year | 1924 |
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| Printer | Bradbury Wilkinson and Company, United Kingdom (1856-1990) |
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| Obverse description | Dark brown on multicolour underprint. The face bears the denomination in large numerals alongside the issuance date, two authorising signatures, and the statutory gold conversion clause stating the litas content in pure gold, all set against a guilloche underprint. Text is arranged in a formal typographic layout typical of early interwar Lithuanian banknote production by Bradbury Wilkinson. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | Blue on multicolour underprint. The central vignette presents the heraldic arms of the three principal Lithuanian cities — Kaunas, Vilnius, and Klaipėda — arranged at centre, framed by elaborate geometric guilloche designs filling the field. A formal anti-counterfeiting legend is inscribed across the note in Lithuanian. |
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| Comments |
The 500 Litu of 1924 belongs to Lithuania's first sovereign currency series, issued after the litas replaced the ostmark and later the ost-ruble left behind by the German wartime occupation. The litas was pegged to the U.S. dollar at 10 litu to the dollar — a deliberately conservative rate engineered to signal fiscal discipline to foreign creditors and stabilize a population that had lived through several successive currency collapses.
Bradbury Wilkinson handled the full series. Their intaglio work of this period was among the finest commercially available, and Lithuania was not unusual in turning to them — the firm printed for dozens of newly independent states scrambling to establish credible currency in the early 1920s.
At 500 litu, this was the highest denomination in the inaugural series, making surviving examples proportionally rarer than the lower values.