OK, here now an inside story(when I still was in school). One day, a close relative came home from work at ECB/EMI, a bit exhausted. This was the day they found

OK, here now an inside story(when I still was in school). One day, a close relative came home from work at ECB/EMI, a bit exhausted. This was the day they found out that the winning draft of the banknotes was indeed NOT FICTION but REAL buildings. This caused a little internal scandal, as I remember that a journalists discovered the real buildings in an art book. So the creator of the banknotes had to go back to draft and actually insert fictional buildings, modeled after typical styles of Europe. So at the very beginning of european banknotes, the subject of the OP post would have been the other way round.