Primož Trubar, 10 SIT.
Slovenia is slated to join the Eurozone in 2007. Accession to the European Union happened nearly two years ago, but since then we’ve been in something of a probationary period, making sure that all the little details necessary for full membership are taken care of, stuff like ensuring that law enforcement practices and road safety are up to EU standards. Next year, Slovenia will be granted all of the privileges of the Schengen Agreement. Border controls will come down along frontiers with Austria and Italy (and Hungary? Ready?), sex workers will move freely, and we will replace the colorful tolar with the, let’s face it, aesthetically drab euro.
Even faced with the prospect of the homogenizing dullness of the euro (and the anticipated price-hikes it may bring) I, for one, will not mourn the passing of this particular bit of cash featured here.
The ten tolar note is the smallest of Slovenia’s folding money, both in buying power and physical size; like many other nations, Slovenia issues notes with sizes relative to worth. The image above is actual size.
I do not love the ten tolar note. Seven of these little slips of paper, if you are unlucky enough to have so much capital tied up in this form, will buy you a cup of coffee from the vending machine where I work. That is, if you can entice the machine to accept them, because ten-tolar notes tend to reach the end-user in a highly rumpled, torn, dirty, dog-eared and Scotch®-taped state.
At today’s rate of exchange, this note is worth €0.041741, or $0.051558. Imagine having a nickle bill. What this means to the walking-around cash-spender is that, if conditions conspire against you, you can have a sizeable wad of money in your pocket yet not have enough buying power for a beer. The humanity!
Much as I dislike this note, I will hew to precendent established in previous money shots #1 and #2, and discuss the iconography. This note honors, if that is the word, Primož Trubar, a champion of the Protestant Reformation in Slovenia (until excommunicated), and the man credited with both standardizing the Slovene language and publishing the first books written in it: the Catechismus and Abecedarium (whose titles look distinctly un-Slovene to me). The latter gets notice in the upper left on the obverse of the note. Trubar also published the first New Testament in Slovene, traces of which you can see on the reverse. Also on the reverse is a picture of the Ursuline Church, on Ljubljana’s Kongresni Trg. Although this page claims it as “the most beautiful Baroque work in Ljubljana”, I have to say that architecturally speaking, it’s not my cup of tea, and only adds to my antipathy toward the note, as does the color scheme. Can we agree that shades of olive, phthalo green, and maroon do not constitute the ideal palette for a note that is doomed to the grubbiness of filthy lucre?
One last thing: this page notes that “Almost every larger town in Slovenia has a street named after” Trubar. Ljubljana, in fact, has a bar named after him: “Trubar”.
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