Romania document photos online

When Romania swapped its money in July 2005, it did something quietly radical for a document-obsessed nation: it printed an entire family of banknotes on plastic. Romania was an early European adopter of polymer notes - waterproof, hard to tear, and far harder to counterfeit than paper. The reform also lopped four zeros off the currency, turning 10,000 old lei into a single new leu and erasing the era when a loaf of bread cost tens of thousands. The leu's very name means "lion," borrowed centuries ago from a Dutch silver coin stamped with a rampant lion that once jingled through Romanian markets.

• Passport power As of January 2025 the Romanian passport ranked 12th in the Henley Passport Index, opening 178 destinations visa-free or visa-on-arrival.
• Passport design Romania's 2024 passport redesign embosses the peony - the national flower - on the cover and shifts the artwork into bluish-green tones with bright orange highlights.
• Biometrics Romania began issuing biometric e-passports on the last day of 2008, with data printed in Romanian, English and French.
• Citizenship Romania is one of the few EU states still granting citizenship by descent up to great-grandparents - it has issued over 500,000 passports to citizens of neighboring Moldova.
• New rule Since 15 March 2025, most descent applicants must prove B1-level Romanian language skills before reclaiming citizenship.
• Currency The leu is divided into 100 bani - and "ban" doubles as the everyday Romanian word for "money."
• Money record Before the 2005 reform Romania's 1,000,000-lei polymer note held a world record as the highest-denomination plastic banknote ever issued.
• Heaviest building Bucharest's Palace of the Parliament is the heaviest building on Earth, weighing roughly 4.1 million tonnes and the largest civilian administrative building in the world.
• Lost recipe The luminous "Voronet blue" of a 1488 monastery fresco has survived 500 years outdoors, yet no one has reproduced exactly how it was made.