20 Zlotys

The 1994 zloty series — of which this note is part — was Poland's first major redesign following the 1995 redenomination, which lopped four zeros off all values. The old 200,000-zloty note became the new 20-zloty note, a direct casualty of hyperinflation that had peaked in 1989–1990 during the turbulent transition from a command economy. PWPW, which had printed Polish currency through both communist and post-communist governments, produced the entire series domestically — an assertion of post-transition institutional capability that earlier decades could not have supported.

The security thread on this series runs as a windowed rather than fully embedded strip, a then-current European standard that PWPW adopted as it modernized its production infrastructure in the early 1990s.