My UAE Collection: ‘Banknotes I began collecting as a boy are now worth Dh1 million’

The paper is soft from age and the hue slightly dimmed, yet its edges are intact. Emblazoned within is a clear portrait, the name of a place and institution, and a serial number. These, collector Elias Baroudy says are all signs of historical banknotes in good condition. He should know, as his personal collection, he adds, built over a lifetime, is valued at more than a million dirhams.

The Lebanese national and Abu Dhabi resident views his collection as more than valuable objects stored in a purpose-built safe in protective sheets. Spanning over a thousand different notes acquired across decades, he sees them more as mementos – postcards from his travels and tokens of insight gleaned from decades of chasing rare currency across three continents. From Latin America and East Asia to the Gulf and North Africa, the notes in his albums capture the sweep of dozens of countries and eras.

“Like everything it starts as a hobby when you are discovering stuff,” Baroudy tells The National, carefully holding a note first given to him when he was 13 by a customer at his father's clothes shop in Beirut's Ashrafieh district.

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Its faded turquoise ink has softened with age, but the print remains sharp, with the cedar tree at its centre framed by Arabic and French legends. It is a Lebanese five-centime note – a denomination so small it is rare to find in mint condition – and part of a series first issued in the 1940s. Printed by the Banque de Syrie et du Liban, these notes are now classed by collectors as early post-independence issues. The market value for such a note today is modest – between $10 and $75 in online marketplaces – but for Baroudy its significance runs deeper.

“This is really how I started being fascinated by history. Not through libraries or books or lectures – it was notes that encapsulated so many of the key elements about a country. Banknotes can tell you everything: geography, resources and minerals, leaders, ports, historical places. These are things written in thousands of books, but you can also get that insight just by looking at a note.”

A marketing consultant, Baroudy spent the following years building his own archive of world history. His collection speaks through banknotes of colonies and monarchies, of revolutionaries, and of nations proudly tied to their past. Also represented are those whose very act of printing their own cash is a declaration of an independent and vibrant future.

The hobby turned serious on a trip to Buenos Aires to see concert by Irish band U2 in 2006. He also had an errand for a friend: to meet an Argentine collector and pick up some notes. Baroudy remembers counters covered with binders and trays, the musty smell of old paper hanging in the air.

“There were banknotes everywhere,” he says. “To me, the shop showed that this can be a real thing to do – that you can have a collection that is so different and full of meaning, and you can even make money from it.”

Immediately, Baroudy began the kinds of calculations that came naturally to someone from a Beirut business family. “At the time I was in Abu Dhabi, I was with my wife and no kids. We couldn't just do a big investment or open a shop. So I thought, let's put a bit of money into old money – let's do banknotes,” he says.

His wife wasn’t exactly convinced by the pitch conceived on the fly. But the now father of two dove into this new world, where prices were tracked through specialist catalogues and deals were exchanged at conferences across Europe through persistence and guile.

His first serious buy came that day in the Buenos Aires shop: a note from Guatemala, printed at a time when private banks were still issuing their own currency at the turn of the 20th century. The $300 investment is now valued at about $1,000, says Baroudy.

Meanwhile, at home, catalogues arrived regularly by post. European and US online auctions became evening and dawn rituals. Soon, the growing pile of exotic notes spread across the dining table. “My wife was concerned about how deep I was getting into it so quickly,” he says with a chuckle. “I would tell her to relax – that yes, these notes may seem like paper but they are like gold. She already understood their value, though; she was scared the notes would bring in ants and cockroaches that would damage them.”

The concerns were quashed with the purchase of Ethiopian notes from 1915 from the Bank of Abyssinia (the country’s first central bank), found on a stall at a collectors' fair in the Dutch municipality of Valkenburg. Baroudy bought a bundle on a whim for $400.

“I remember being amazed by how it looked. It was so exotic and the fact it had not been released before shows how rare it is,” he says. “I just wanted it in my collection. Then, two years later, an auction house told me it could have a sale price starting at £21,000. That's when I thought it was time to get a safe.”

That windfall taught him there was a method to successful collecting. Baroudy followed the trajectory of a typical collector, beginning with Lebanese notes until he amassed copies of nearly all editions from the 1940s through the 2000s.

“It is practical to begin collecting your country's notes because it is less expensive,” he says. “Sometimes you might see the same note in the US and it's cheaper only because they don't know its value. That's when you become alert and just buy it without showing how excited you are. That's probably the best part of travelling to collect notes.”

After mastering his home turf, Baroudy says the next step was to acquire “keynotes”: odd denominations and short-lived issues. A prized possession is his collection of Mongolian notes, printed in Cyrillic script. “The monks printed these in 1924, but surrendered after a coup. Look at the date,” he says, pointing to the corner. “One year of circulation, then withdrawn. That's what makes it a keynote.”

Finding such notes requires going on the road to renowned fairs in Dutch cities such as Valkenburg and Maastricht, as well as German capital Berlin. Sometimes it evens means returning to where it all started. On a recent trip to Beirut, he met a dealer who was clearing out his wardrobe and found 12 Colombian notes tucked in a drawer. The family had emigrated decades earlier, leaving behind traces of their South American years.

Baroudy recalls suppressing his excitement, feigning disappointment as he paid $1,200. Upon his return to the UAE, he sold them for ten times that amount and partly reinvested the earnings in buying a rare Qatar–Dubai note from the 1960s.

“Collectors dream of finding it cheap,” he says. “To search and find, not to pay the market price, that's where the thrill lies.”

The excitement isn't only financial but emotional. His cousin in Lebanon who collects carpets once told him: “You're lucky. I can run with one carpet. You can run with your whole collection in a bag.”

Baroudy smiles at the memory, while pointing to a harsher reality that comes with being a Lebanese man who grew up during the civil war. “It's papers, not gold, not silver, and it's an easy way to take that value with you if you have to leave everything behind quickly,” he says. “That instinct to be ready is deep in the psyche of many Lebanese and Armenian families. In the back of our brain, there's always something that says: be ready, something and anything might happen.”