10 Heller, Gemeinde Erla bei St. Valentin, 1920

Austria in 1919 was a republic of six and a half million people left holding the currency of an empire of fifty. The Austro-Hungarian Bank was in liquidation, the peace treaties had cut the country off from most of its coal and much of its food, and small coin simply vanished: hoarded against worse to come, melted for the metal, or carried across the new frontiers where it bought more. Shops could not give change, and a country that cannot give change cannot trade.

So the communes printed their own. A council resolution, a local printer, a redemption date and the pledge of the commune's entire movable and immovable property - that was the whole legal apparatus behind several thousand separate issues of Heller notes between 1919 and 1921. Vienna tolerated it while it solved a real problem and moved to stop it in 1920, by which time the notes had found a second market: collectors would pay more than face value for a complete set, so a village could raise real money by printing money it hoped would never be presented. The artwork improved as the need receded.

Erla is a village near St. Valentin in Lower Austria, and what it had was a convent: a Benedictine house founded in the eleventh century, dissolved under Joseph II, its church still standing. The note's face is captioned Erla Closter 1672 and shows the long low range of the monastery with its church tower above the fields.

On the reverse, in the centre panel between the two halves of the legal text, stands an abbess in her habit with a crozier - the house's own authority, drawn from its monuments, printed on money issued by the parish that inherited its buildings.

The whole issue was thirty-two thousand Kronen, redeemable at the parish treasury to the last day of 1920.