1st Price: "Money does not smell"

Written by Justus Schönlau, student on the Central European University Budapest. He was the founder of AEGEE-Edinburgh and is currently member of AEGEE-Gödöllö.

Brussels/European Capitals:"Pecunia non olet - the history of European money tokens"

To mark the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the European Montetary Union, an exhibition on the history of money is being opened today in the 25 museums of European history around the Union. The show under the Latin slogan "money does not smell" takes us back to the times when money still came into shape of rectangular pieces of paper bearing images of people or buildings, or even as small metal coins.

The show will be inaugurated tomorrow simultaneously in the 25 capitals by the president of the United States of Europe and the inauguration will also feature a concert of the 25 European Symphony orchestras conducted by virtual link from Brussels.

The exhibition itself however does not only look at the time from 1999 onwards, when eleven European regions (at the time they were still referred to as countries) joined to create a single unit of monetary exchange, but it also shows the different tokens that were in circulation prior to the Monetary Union. Then every country had what it called a "national currency" with a distinct name and a specific value which changed over time against that of neighbouring areas. The situation was similar to the changing exchange rate between Euro values and the other world regional units of financial exchange until the introduction of the WEU (World Exchange Unit) in 2031. The national currency was at the time an important token of the independence and sovereignty of the different national political units and in some cases was even seen as an element of the regional identity. The "pecunia non olet" exhibition illustrates this phenomenon by devoting an important section to the initial problems following the introduction of the single European currency. For both political and economic reasons the start of this daring project was far from smooth: the economies of different parts of the world which still relied on slow transport of goods and was fragmented by a maze of different laws and regulations between regions were so different that some countries had to struggle very hard to keep up with the more advanced economies to whom they were tied through the new currency. Even more importantly many people did not understand the political importance of the whole idea of the currency union, and the exhibition includes shocking surround-video pictures of violent demonstrations against the Euro in several European cities. But the documents also show that these protests did last only a couple of years and finally subsided as the Union was enlarged in 2005 to include some central European countries. This enlargement posed difficult adjustment problems which could only be dealt with because the countries of the Monetary Union could make a joint effort.

But the most entertaining part of the exhibition is certainly the section where different money tokens are on display and the viewer can actually participate in animated financial transactions as they used to happen in the late years of the 20th century: you can go on a virtual round trip of the 25 European capitals (a journey which still took more than twenty four hours in those days!). If you only wanted to buy a drink in every city, you had to exchange small pieces of paper and metal every time. The exhibition allows you the experience of communicating in a language you do not speak with a human exchanger, who charges you a commission every time so that the money you start of with is reduced by around 60 per cent by the end of your trip. In every city you get a new set of money with different faces and signs on it, with denominations ranging from 1 to 100.000 and in every place you have to work out afresh how much you are charged for your drink. The virtual representations of cities like Rome, Paris, Budapest or Lisbon in the late 1990s are superb, complete with smells, changing temperatures and the opportunity to meet famous personalities of the respective countries. But everything is geared towards showing the central role that paper money played for our grand-parents, and even as I bumped into an old men in the streets of virtual Rome who claimed to be the pope of 1999, he asked me to change a 100.000 bill of some currency into two 50.000 bills - and I terribly upset him by handing two bills which said 5000 and carried the picture of somebody called Szechenyi Istvan!

The show is on in all branches of the European History Museum until December 2049, and provides great entertainment and interesting historical information for the whole family - go see it, smell it,touch it!