Follow the money explore the country !!! Croatia travel the land from one end to the other PART 1

Follow the money explore the country

This will be a series of posts on discovering Croatia.I work as a tourist guide and sure I can jap along for hours about sights and monuments but I will try to take a different approach. Let us start with an intro, a little bit about the money and Croatia itself. The headline follow the money explore the country is my attempt to explain the lay of the land through the currency. Croatia is new and up and coming tourist destination and most of the people visiting are here over the summer months. The Country is not just the Adriatic sea and the coastline, there is also a big piece of the country just east of the capital Zagreb. This wast and undiscovered land I will try to show you through some of the bank notes. I will start in the east and we will travel so to say trough the entire country to the south tip of Croatia.

I will only cover paper money it is the most interesting way to follow the map and meet historical figures and architectural monuments commemorated on the bank notes.

The Kuna is actually an animal, in english, it would be a Marten, which is in the weasel family. So a small animal living in the woods and hunting other smaller animals. Not to be mistaken with the Czech Koruna it has an entirely different meaning, Koruna in Czech means crown, as in what a king would wear on his head, the croatian word for crown is kruna. As you can see similar and complicated these are Slavic languages for you. Luckily we are not trying to tackle linguistics here.

Kunas were in use long before Croatia's independence in the 90s. The skins or pelts of Martens where used as tax payment during the Roman and the Medieval ages in the area of the Pannonian basin.In the later centuries, the value was tied even to silver coins. These coins are known as Banovac and were minted in Zagreb during the 13th and 14th century.

To get back on track, the currency itself is in circulation since 1994. and the design was inspired by the Deutsche Mark (Germany's currency before the introduction of the Euro) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Mark. The banknotes were designed by Vilko Žiljak and Miroslav Šutej a croatian painter and graphic artist who is also responsible for the design of the Croatian flag. They were put in circulation in denominations of 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500 and 1000. The 5 Kuna bill isn't in use anymore for a few years now but every now and then some of them find there way from shops and bars in the pockets of tourists. So watch out for them on your next visit but on the other side, they make a nice souvenir.

Each bill has on its obverse the likeness of a famous person from Croatia's history and on its reverse an architectural monument from a different city in the country. We will follow the money and explore Croatia from one end to the other. I will explain a little about the person, the monument and the city it was built in.

The guide will begin with the 20 kuna bill in Slavonia, Josip Jelačić and the city of Vukovar.

Stay tuned we will make our way from continental Croatia to the Adriatic sea.

If you have any questions about the topic explained above please let me know in the comments below.

picture source: http://www.kunalipa.com http://www.enciklopedija.hr