2 Zlotys Zbigniew Herbert

Herbert died in 1998, and this issue marks a decade since his death — part of NBP's long-running Nordic gold series honoring Polish cultural figures. His reputation rests heavily on the Cogito cycle and the character of Mr Cogito, a philosophical everyman Herbert used to examine moral resistance under totalitarianism. He spent years in internal exile of a kind, deliberately marginalized by communist authorities who found his refusal to conform professionally inconvenient. The series has issued hundreds of such two-zloty pieces since 1995, and secondary market premiums on cultural figures vary sharply by collector interest rather than mintage alone.