10 Kronen, Stadt Salzburg, 1919

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.

Salzburg's note is a different order of thing from the village Heller scrip: ten Kronen, not ten Heller - twenty times the largest denomination in this group - redeemable not on a fixed date but "until called in", and not at the parish office but at the counters of the Salzburger Sparkasse, the city savings bank.

That is a city with a banking system behind it borrowing from its own citizens in small amounts, and it is why this note has no expiry: it was meant to circulate until the coin came back, however long that took. The face is bordered in pen-drawn scrollwork with the city arms at the top; the reverse shows the Mirabell gardens with the Hohensalzburg fortress behind them, which is the view Salzburg has been selling for two hundred years.

Three signatures, all by hand: two councillors flanking the mayor, Josef Preis.