Treasury ticket - 500 Polish zlotys

Wartime needs forced the Supreme Commander of the National Armed Forces and the Supreme National Council to conduct large-scale financial operations. The search for funds to wage an expensive war required the handling of considerable sums. This consideration determined the need for the introduction into circulation of treasury tickets of high denominations. Since they were intended to meet the needs of the internal market, they were not printed in large numbers. One of the highest denominations issued by the Directorate of Treasury Tickets was the five hundred-zloty ticket. Only five hundred were printed, and it was the least numerous of all paper money issued during the Kościuszko Uprising. As a result, it is now a very rare collector's item. Due to the small number of copies printed, all of them were issued in one series marked with the letter A. The situation was repeated only in the case of the thousand-zloty tickets, which were also issued in a single series. In the remaining cases these were multi-series issues, not counting the five- and ten-groszy tickets, which, although printed in large numbers, were issued without a series designation.

The five-hundred-zloty tickets – just like other tickets – had among other safeguards against counterfeiting individual numbers entered manually during their issue. Since only five hundred copies were issued, their numbers have from one to three digits. The Museum has in its collection only one five-hundred-zloty ticket with the number 486, which means that it belonged to the fifteen last tickets issued to recipients and therefore it was in circulation for a shorter time than tickets with lower numbers. Perhaps this fact was decisive for the relatively good state of preservation of the object, which was glued on the reverse with blotting paper as part of conservation measures.

The ticket was printed on rather thick paper coloured brick-red with a pink tinge. The three highest denominations of the treasury tickets – one hundred, five hundred and one thousand-zloty tickets – bear the signatures of the same commissioners at the bottom, i.e., J. Gaczkowski, J. Klek and A. Michałowski, which distinguishes them from the lower denominations, where the composition of the commissioners differed, depending on the value of the ticket, and in the case of the five-zloty tickets also depending on the series.

Leszek Poniewozik