2 Leva Foreign Exchange Certificate

Bulgaria's Foreign Exchange Certificates — known locally as "certifikati" — were issued by the Bulgarska Narodna Banka specifically to handle hard currency tourism receipts during the socialist period. Visitors exchanging Western currency received these in lieu of standard leva, which were not legally transferable out of the country. The certificates could be spent at Corecom stores, the state-run chain selling imported and otherwise unavailable goods — a two-tier retail system that quietly acknowledged the inconvertibility of the domestic currency while extracting foreign exchange from the economy.

The 1981 series is among the later issues of the type before the system was restructured in the mid-1980s.