50 000 Zlotys

By 1989, Polish inflation was accelerating toward the hyperinflationary peak that would follow in 1990, and denominations like this 50,000 złoty note were a direct symptom — a face value that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. The Narodowy Bank Polski had been issuing progressively larger denominations throughout the 1980s as the communist government's price controls collapsed under the weight of unsustainable subsidies and foreign debt.

Printed domestically by PWPW in Warsaw, the series avoided the foreign printing contracts Poland had occasionally used in earlier decades. The security thread runs vertically and is visible under transmitted light — a relatively modest feature for the period, though consistent with the broader PWPW output of the late communist era.