Occasionally, the local BNR is open to visitors. This is not one of those occasions.
We heard from a foreigner who was confused after reading about the ‘Money speaks to Us” exhibit at the Banca National de Romania. It was notified in a Cluj Newspaper, Monitorul. (Monitorul is one of the four largest Romanian language newspapers in Cluj, and you can find it at some of Cluj’s top hotels.) Monitorul didn’t state, however, where the museum was.
If you want to see the Bank’s museum, you’ll need to go to Bucharest. And you’ll need a reservation. You can make reservations for those times when they offer a guided tour. Guided tours last about an hour. Visits to the museum are free, but you’ll have to pay your way to get to the museum. (If you’re based in Cluj, that might be an eight hour train ride.)
The local branch in Cluj is not a full time museum and is rarely open to visitors. They did have a similar exhibit in the Cluj branch of BNR a few years ago, and had an open exhibit last year. These exhibits, or “open door days” tend to last for a couple of days only, and in past years were in April or May.
The temporary exhibit in Cluj, if you are here in April or May, is interesting. When you see prices in lei, that is really the plural of leu. (Yes, you are paying with lions. With new lions, actually.)
We see how the Leu “is a direct descendent” of the Dutch Leu coin. Or, in Dutch, the Leeuw.
We also see the story of the treasury being sent to Moscow for safe keeping during the first world war. Then, the October revolution happened. The Bolsheviks made some excuse about the money being stolen from the workers to keep the Romanian state treasury for themselves. However, when Romania became a socialist state, the USSR still kept most of the stolen treasure, proving it was just a balderdash pretext to steal.