LITHUANIA (1993-2015) Lithuanian litas [LTL]

1 litas = 100 centų

Ten days before announcing independence from Soviet Union, on March 1, 1990, the Bank of Lithuania was reactivated. The first task was to withdraw Soviet roubles [SUR] from circulation and to issue national currency named "litas", which had already been used during the Republic time before the World War 2. Firstly a temporal currency was introduced - "talonas" [LTT], which replaced roubles et par. In the same time a competition for designing Lithuanian litas banknotes and coins was announced. Litas [LTL] was issued by a decision from June 14, 1993 and the exchange rate was set to 1 talonas = 1 centas. Talonas banknotes were exceptionally easy to counterfeit and due to lack of appropriate control during the exchange vast amounts of forgeries were legalised. Litas on the other hand was based fully on Lithuanian gold (ca. 10 tones), which was stored in many banks all around Europe during the Soviet occupation. The value of litas was set to 4.5 LTL for 1 USD. On February 2, 2002 litas was tied to euro [EUR] currency with a rate 3.4528 LTL for 1 EUR and after nearly 13 years was replaced by euro with the same rate.