20 Santimu

Latvia's first coinage series, issued following independence from Russian imperial control, was struck entirely at the Huguenot-founded Le Locle mint in Switzerland — Latvia having no mint infrastructure of its own in the early 1920s. The 20 Santimu was part of that inaugural emission, a practical necessity for a government scrambling to establish a functioning monetary system while simultaneously fighting off Soviet and German Freikorps incursions on its eastern and western borders.

The Swiss contract covered Latvia's base-metal coinage needs through the mid-1920s, when the Latvian lats had stabilized sufficiently to attract longer-term monetary planning.