2 Zlotys Co-operative Banking

Part of the NBP's long-running Nordic gold collector series, this issue commemorates the cooperative banking movement in Poland, which dates to the mid-19th century — specifically the credit societies established in Prussian-partitioned Poland by Hipolit Cegielski and Karol Marcinkowski as instruments of economic self-defense against Germanization policies. Those early institutions operated less as banks than as survival mechanisms, pooling capital for a population legally excluded from many forms of economic participation.