Agenția Sighet a Băncii Naționale a României în perioada 1921–1950
Authors:   Banca Națională a României, Păunescu Cristian , Manea Nadia ,   Banca Națională a României
Published: March 2024

Based on our research of archived documents, this paper retraces the history of the Sighet Agency of the National Bank of Romania (NBR) in the period between 1921 and 1950, that is from the time of its establishment to the time of Romania’s first administrative reorganisation during the communist regime. The establishment of the agency was part of the process of expanding the branch and agency network of the National Bank of Romania after the Union of 1918 and can be explained in several ways: the demographic, economic, and banking potential of the town of Sighet within Maramureș county, notwithstanding the challenges presented by the status of local means of transportation, the railway in particular, given that it was not entirely built on Romanian territory; the completion of monetary unification before the establishment of the local agency; the stages of acquiring the Sighet offices of the former Austrian-Hungarian Bank and the appointment of the agency’s first bank officers. The agency’s actual discount lending (rediscounting) operations, bearing the lowest existing interest rate, are exemplified by listing the agency’s customers and their loans, as well as by data showing the growing business volumes in the period from 1923 to 1929. For relevance purposes, the data is compared with similar data from the Craiova and Cluj branches. The impact of the Great Depression can be seen in the evolution of another banking operation, namely bank transfers, as well as in the audit reports prepared by auditors from the bank’s head office. There is also a list of people whose professional destiny was linked to the NBR Sighet Agency in the period between the two World Wars, both bank managers and other bank officers, among whom one may notice the remarkable figure of Romulus Roman, whose life tragically ended in a communist prison, after an exceptional career with the central bank. The consequences of the territorial changes which took place between 1938 and 1940 near Romania’s north-western border on the activity of the Sighet Agency are also traced back from the time when railway transportation was discontinued to the time when the bank’s offices were evauted. The last part of our paper is dedicated to the events which happened between 1945 and 1950, namely: the return of bank officers to the NBR Sighet offices in the context of the presence of Red Army troops in the region at a time of turmoil surrounding the establishment of Romania’s northern border; the withdrawal of foreign legal tenders (the Hungarian pengő, the Soviet pengö, roubles, Soviet lei); the resumption of bank operations in the context of the dramatic changes imposed by the communist regime, culminating at the time in the nationalisation of the NBR, the dissolution of banks, the disestablishment of Maramureș county and the establishment of the Baia Mare Region, following which the Sighet Agency of the Bank of the Romanian People’s Republic – the State Bank became the Sighet Region Subsidiary subordinated to the Baia Mare Regional Branch.