5000 Korun

This note was prepared in 1945 as Czechoslovakia re-established its banking infrastructure following liberation, but the timing created immediate problems — the postwar monetary reform of October 1945 drastically restricted currency exchange allowances, and high-denomination notes like this 5000 Korun were disproportionately affected. Large holdings were subject to blocking, effectively freezing the value for many holders.

Švabinský was one of the most decorated Czech graphic artists of the twentieth century, and his collaboration with engravers Mráček and Fojtášek produced work of unusually high technical quality for a note issued under such turbulent conditions. Printed domestically in Prague rather than abroad — unlike many interwar Czechoslovak issues — the entire production chain was a deliberate assertion of recovered institutional capacity.