50 Cents Foreign Exchange Certificate

Bank Pekao's Foreign Exchange Certificates — Bony Towarowe — were not currency in any conventional sense. They were issued to Poles receiving hard currency remittances from abroad, obliging recipients to exchange their dollars or deutschmarks into these certificates rather than hold foreign cash. The certificates could then be spent only at Pewex stores, the state's hard-currency retail chain, where Western goods unavailable to ordinary citizens sat behind glass counters.

The 1979 series was printed domestically by PWPW, an unusual choice given how politically sensitive the program's very existence was — an official acknowledgment that socialist zloty simply could not buy what hard currency could.