NEW BOOK: UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE BANKNOTES

A new topical collecting field has gained interest in the last couple of years - collecting banknotes with UNESCO World Heritage Sites depicted. So what are these sites? A World Heritage Site is a landmark or area with legal protection by an international convention administered by the UNESCO. World Heritage Sites are designated by UNESCO for having cultural, historical, scientific or other forms of significance. The sites are judged to contain "cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity". In practice, cultural sites are man made - buildings and statutes for instance. Natural sites are locations formed over a great deal of time - Niagara Falls and Kilimanjaro National Park for instance.

After 6 months of research, I have released an Adobe Acrobat pdf file, "The Complete Catalog of UNESCO World Heritage Sites on Banknotes". Some facts gleaned from the work:

The body of the work is sorted by country in alphabetical order, then by site - also alphabetically. There are two approaches to this work, sort by country or sort by site. Since some collectors are only interested in sites on a country they collect, I have added a "quick list" sorted by country. Other collectors are interested in specific sites or collect all world country, so I've added a "quick list" sorted by site as well.

When I started tallying the world banknotes depicting UNESCO World Heritage Sites I soon discovered it was a daunting and huge task. In most cases the site shown is not titled. Both the banknotes and reference books often use alternate spellings or Diacritic marks. When a search feature is used these issues totally eliminate the subject from being found. Most UNESCO sites have specific locations, meaning a search of words or images can be time consuming. For example, the UNESCO site "Paris, Banks of the Seine" only includes specific buildings along the Seine River in Paris. Most of the sites of cities are limited to specific locations in the city - "Historic Center", "Old Bridge Area", and "Fortified Area" as examples. Even so this book is the result of much entertaining research and detective work.

Should you attempt to find UNESCO sites on banknotes, here is some of the work done for this site. Using Bamiyan as a search term:

The Bank Note Book, Afghanistan chapter yields all three notes (but two spelled with the alternate spelling Bamyan).
The Standard Catalog of World Paper Money (General & Modern) yields one note.
The Bank Note Museum online website yields none.
The crowd-sourced Numista yields two notes.
The crowd-sourced Banknote database yields one note.
The crowd-sourced Coinect yields one note.
The crowd-sourced Numizon yields one note, referencing details from BNB.

As can be seen from the above exercise, watch for alternate spellings!