The Romanian leu

How the four zeroes came off

The National Bank of Romania holds sole responsibility for issuing the leu and keeping it in circulation. It carried out the redenomination, called denominare in Romanian, on 1 July 2005, and every account was converted that day. Shops had displayed prices in both currencies since 1 March 2005 and kept doing so until 30 June 2006. Many cash machines had to be reprogrammed.

Old coins left circulation on 31 December 2005 and old notes a year later, on 31 December 2006. Wikipedia records no time limit on exchanging them. Speech has been slower to change: as of 2020 it was still common to call 100 lei un milion, a million, and 500 lei five million.

Where the lion in the name comes from

The Dutch leeuwendaalder, the lion thaler, was copied in several German and Italian cities, and those coins circulated in Romania, Moldova and Bulgaria. Each country took the name for its own money: the Romanian leu, the Moldovan leu and the Bulgarian lev.

A first attempt at a national currency, the românul, stalled in 1860 when the Ottoman Empire refused to approve it. The leu itself was adopted on 22 April 1867 as a bimetallic currency, worth 5 grams of silver at 83.5% fineness or 0.29032 grams of gold. The first leu coin was minted in Romania in 1870. In 1889 Romania joined the Latin Monetary Union on its own initiative and moved to the gold standard, which it left in 1914.

Which leus came before this one

The present leu is the fourth. A second leu arrived on 15 August 1947 in the Great Stabilisation, at 20,000 old lei to one, with no warning and a cap on how much each person could convert: 5 million old lei for farmers, 3 million for workers and pensioners. Only about half of the 48.5 billion old lei in circulation were exchanged.

The third leu followed on 28 January 1952, again without warning, at rates from 20 to 400 old lei depending on whether the money was cash, a deposit or a debt. From 1970 to 1989 the government fixed the exchange rate by law, and owning foreign currency was a crime punishable by up to ten years in prison. Owning it became legal in 1990.

What the polymer notes show

The fourth leu arrived with polymer notes of 1, 5, 10, 50, 100 and 500 lei in 2005, and a 200 lei note joined them in 2006. Their designs follow the old notes they replaced, from the 10,000 to the 1,000,000 lei. The 20 lei was added in November 2021. Each front pairs a figure from Romanian history with a plant: the historian Nicolae Iorga with a gentian on the 1 leu, the composer George Enescu with a carnation on the 5, the poet Mihai Eminescu with lime flowers on the 500. The notes are the same size as euro banknotes, a choice Wikipedia connects to preparation for the euro.

There is no 1 leu coin. The coins run from 1 ban to 50 bani, in plated steel and nickel brass, and have all been valid since 2005.

When Romania expects to adopt the euro

Romania joined the European Union in 2007 and remains outside the euro area. Its Convergence Report of 2014 set 1 January 2019 as a target. The 2020 report found that none of the four economic criteria were met, and the target has since moved: to 2027 or 2028 in a government statement of February 2021, then to 2029, and in August 2026 a minister named 2032 as a possible date.