20 Zlotys Juliusz Słowacki

This note was issued to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Juliusz Słowacki, the Romantic poet whose remains were repatriated from Paris — where he died in 1849 — to Wawel Cathedral in Kraków in 1927, a state ceremony presided over by Józef Piłsudski. The repatriation itself was politically charged; Piłsudski reportedly declared that Słowacki deserved to be among kings.

P#180 is a commemorative collector issue rather than a circulation note, printed by PWPW on cotton paper with relatively modest security provisions for its type. Krajewski's engraving work on Polish commemoratives of this period is consistently among the finer examples of the intaglio craft still practiced domestically.