25 Centimes

Bruges issued its own small-denomination emergency notes in 1915 under German occupation, when the Belgian franc had effectively vanished from daily commerce — hoarded, requisitioned, or simply absent. These Stadskas ("city cash") pieces were a municipal stopgap, authorized at the local level precisely because the occupying authorities had stripped the normal banking infrastructure of any practical function.

Amedée Visart de Bocarmé was the city's burgomaster, a position he held continuously from 1875 until his death in 1925 — one of the longest civic tenures in Belgian history, which lent the wartime issue a degree of public credibility it might otherwise have lacked.