10 Zlotys Czesław Miłosz

Issued the year after Miłosz's centenary, this coin belongs to Poland's long-running series honoring Nobel laureates and national literary figures. Miłosz himself had a complicated relationship with the Polish state — he defected to the West in 1951 while serving as a cultural attaché in Paris, and his work remained banned in the Polish People's Republic for decades. The Communist authorities considered him a traitor; he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, the same year Solidarity emerged from the Gdańsk shipyards.

His rehabilitation inside Poland came only after 1989. The irony of the National Bank issuing his likeness on legal tender would not have been lost on him.