BELGRADE, Sept 16 — His day job is working as a locksmith but out of hours Zoran Milosevic’s passion is to hunt down rare coins and bank notes as part of a 36-year quest to collect all the currencies of the world.

At his home in the northern Serbian village of Pavlovci, Milosevic showed off decades of his painstaking work with colourful notes and coins lined up under protective glass.

He said he had managed to collect 194 different currencies, including some which are no longer in use, and his achievement was even more impressive as he rarely left his Serbian home to find them.

Instead he relied on the kindness of friends who went on holiday or lived abroad, and occasionally bought a currency and had it sent through the post.

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Crucially, and distressingly for Milosevic, he is missing one currency that would complete his collection: the Solomon Islands dollar.

The coins and notes from the Pacific archipelago off Australia — some 15,000 kilometres (9,300 miles) from Serbia — remain elusive.

My goal is to “demonstrate how small the world is because you can lock it (all the currencies) in a box of 1.5 m2 (11 square feet),” he said.

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If one day he managed to find a Solomon Islands note it would complete his collection and “prove what can be done by human perseverance,” he added. — AFP-Relaxnews