25 Centimes

Bruges issued its own emergency fractional notes in 1915 under German occupation, when small coin had essentially vanished from circulation — hoarded by civilians and absorbed by military requisitioning almost immediately after the invasion. Hundreds of Belgian communes did the same, producing a chaotic patchwork of local scrip that the occupying administration tolerated rather than sanctioned.

The two signatories — C. Debandt and Baron Evan Caloen — represented the city's civil administration, which continued functioning under occupation as a matter of practical necessity. Baron Caloen came from one of the oldest Flemish patrician families, a detail that would have carried quiet weight with a local population navigating the politics of collaboration and survival.