20 Zlotys

Bank Polski's 1929 zloty series marked a critical consolidation of the currency introduced five years earlier under the Grabski reforms, which had ended the catastrophic hyperinflation of the early 1920s. By 1929 the zloty had stabilized on a gold basis, and this note circulated during the brief period of relative monetary confidence before the Great Depression hit Poland particularly hard.

PWPW had been established in Warsaw in 1919 specifically to give the reconstituted Polish state sovereign control over its own securities production — printing here rather than abroad carried real political weight for a country that had only regained independence in 1918. P#70 remained in circulation well into the 1930s.