Banknote Museum of the Ionian Bank

When the Ionian Bank opened in Corfu in 1840, it became Greece’s first bank, though it was established in London to finance trade for a British protectorate. Its first banknotes weren’t even in drachmas, but Spanish dollars called columnarios. Today, the bank’s neoclassical headquarters houses a museum chronicling Greek history through currency: from revolutionary bonds in 1822 to a 100 billion drachma note from 1944’s hyperinflation (worth just 2 drachmas after the crisis ended). Admission and guided tours are free.

The building itself is part of the story. Designed by a local Corfiot architect, the neoclassical structure was an act of civic ambition as much as financial pragmatism, built to project permanence and confidence in a colonial institution that would outlast the British protectorate it served. Inside, the permanent collection traces what happened next: how a bank founded in London with Spanish currency gradually became woven into the fabric of Greek economic identity. Each note in the cases charts a different chapter, from the fragile paper bonds that helped finance the revolutionary war to the increasingly absurd denominations of the occupation-era hyperinflation, when printing presses struggled to keep pace with collapse. The result is a museum where Victorian banking traditions and Mediterranean history fold into each other, and where currency functions less as financial artifact than as a record of everything Greece survived.