5 Centimes - Avelghem

Belgian necessity money issued by a private establishment — in this case a hotel acting as a de facto micro-issuer during the German occupation of World War One, when small-denomination coinage vanished almost entirely from circulation. Hundreds of Belgian communes, shops, and businesses printed or stamped their own token money between 1914 and 1918 to fill the void. Cardboard was the most common substrate, cheap and available where paper was not.

Avelghem is a small municipality in West Flanders. That a single hotel here issued fiduciary tokens redeemable presumably on-premises speaks to how completely the monetary infrastructure collapsed at the local level.