Poland 10 Zloty And 20 Zloty 1925 Coins (Boleslaw Chrobry)

The following article was written by Jerzy Chalupski and published on December 4th, 2016 (link to the original article in Polish).

As the text provides the context of minting the 1925 Polish gold coins which may be of interest to some - and considering the fact that the pre-war legal provisions quoted by the author are presented not as text but images making machine translation less straightforward, here is a translation of the whole thing.

To improve legibility, excerpts from regulations, announcements, and reports are in brown. Any additions or explanations that are not present in the original text are in brackets.

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Boleslaw Chrobry - 10 zloty and 20 zloty dated 1925
by Jerzy Chalupski

The ten and twenty zloty gold coins dated 1925 are the subject of constant discussions. Many questions are being asked, such as:
* are they circulation coins or not?
* why does one find notes such as "minted in yellow gold" or "minted in red gold" among the descriptions of these coins in auction catalogs?
* how many coins were minted?

I will try to collect all the facts which I managed to determine here:

Article 3. The following coins will be minted:
1) gold: with the face value of 100 zloty, 50 zloty, 20 zloty, 10 zloty (.)
Article 4. The gold coins will be minted of a 900/1000 gold and 100/1000 copper alloy. 3100 zloty in gold will be minted from one kilo of this alloy (.) The weight of the 10 zloty coins is 3.22580 grams, the diameter - 19 millimeters.

These were the provisions of the regulation of the Treasury Ministry dated April 23rd, 1924. Article 11 of this regulation is also of great importance

Article 11. The gold coins are minted for the Treasury and also for private persons who submit gold to be coined, in an amount not less than 100 grams of pure gold. The gold coins, specified in Article 3 section one, minted for private persons in accordance with the conditions determined by the Treasury Minister, will have the values which are determined to be useful for circulation by the Treasury Minister.

A competition for the designs of gold coins was held in 1924. This open contest, held shortly after the first contest for the designs of small circulation coins, did not meet expectations. A new competition was announced in early 1925. This competition is well documented as the verdicts were published in specialized journals. 23 designs were submitted. They were evaluated in August. The first prize was awarded to the design by Zofia Trzcinska-Kaminska which depicted the head of Boleslaw Chrobry. The second prize went to Antoni Madeyski, and the third to Stanislaw Szukalski (bust of Copernicus). The fact that 1925 was the 900th anniversary of the Boleslaw Chrobry coronation might have been decisive in awarding the first prize.

The following regulation was issued (only!) in June 1926

368.
Regulation of the Treasury Ministry
dated June 14th, 1926
on the modification of the designs of the 10 zloty and 20 zloty gold coins.
Based on article 12 of the regulation of the President of Poland on the monetary system, published by the regulation of the Treasury Minister dated April 23rd, 1924 on the text of the regulation on the monetary system (Journal of Laws of the Republic of Poland number 37, position 401), it is hereby ordered that:
§1. Gold coins with values of 10 zloty and 20 zloty, the minting of which is specified by Article 3 of the regulation of the President of Poland on the monetary system, are determined [to look] in accordance with the designs presented in the attachment to this regulation.
§2. This regulation becomes effective on the day of publishing.
§3. On the day when this regulation becomes effective, the designs of the 10 zloty and 20 zloty gold coins determined in the regulation of the Treasury Minister dated May 26th, 1924 on the determination of the coin designs, are repealed.
Treasury Minister: C. Klarner

The designs of the 10 zloty and 20 zloty gold coins.
Design number 1. Obverse of the 20 zloty gold coin.
Design number 2. Obverse of the 10 zloty gold coin.
Design number 3. Reverse of the 10 zloty and 20 zloty gold coins.
[images of the final designs shown, not to scale]

The reports of the [Warsaw] State Mint state that the minting of gold coins began in 1926. The first report (1924-1926) specifies that 50,350 ten zloty coins and 27,240 twenty zloty coins were minted. The same amounts can also be found in the third report dated 1934 which summarized the first decade of the mint's operation.
These amounts are listed in catalogs as the final mintages of the Chrobry gold coins. This is a bit strange, as in the provisions issued after 1926 it was underlined that the mint reserves the right to mint coins using gold submitted by private persons. There were probably about 1 million twenty zloty coins minted. Analyzing the coins under a microscope confirms the existence of at least 5 die pairs (information from the GDA 1st auction catalog).

"Second Republic (1918-1939)
20 zloty - 1925
Prooflike
Mint: Warsaw
(.)
The gold twenty zloty coins were minted in large amounts which is confirmed by the amount of dies used - at least 5 pairs but probably more - and distinct signs of die wear which are visible on most specimens. The "technical" mintage of these coins probably exceeded 1 million pieces, although only several tens of thousands of these coins left the treasury. The die wear is the reason for the fact that the luster on the twenty zloty coins is usually less prominent and the eye-appeal of these coins worse than those of the ten zloty coins. The latter ones were minted in smaller amounts and specimens minted using relatively fresh dies are prevalent among them. We are offering an exceptional specimen here, one of the first coins minted using this die pair. The appearance of this specimen is no different from a proof one."

The amount issued and the consequent die wear, resulted in the fact that the minting quality of the twenty zloty coins does not match the ten zloty coins which were minted in far smaller quantities (though certainly more than the catalogs tell us - the lack of sources and detailed research makes it impossible to assess the real mintage). Catalog authors are not unanimous regarding the status of pre-war Polish gold. The size of the issue and the legal provisions exclude the possibility of the Chrobry gold coins being patterns. It is difficult to consider them to be circulation coins, as for example in 1936:

"536.
Announcement of the Treasury Minister
dated December 23rd, 1936
on the value of one gram of pure gold.
Based on Article 36 of the regulation of the President of Poland dated June 12th, 1934 on liabilities in foreign currency (Journal of Laws of the Republic of Poland, number 59, position 509) and the regulation of the Treasury Minister dated August 3rd, 1934 on calculating and publishing the price of gold (Journal of Laws of the Republic of Poland, number 72, position 694) - it is hereby determined that the price of one gram of pure gold, for the month of January 1937, is 5 zloty and 92.44 groszy.
Treasury Minister:
E.Kwiatkowski.

The twenty zloty coin weighing 6.451 grams, minted in 900 gold, contains 5.8059 grams of pure gold. That, according the the cited announcement, had the value of 34.40 zloty. Considerably more than the face value of the coin. That means the Second Republic gold coins were classic bullion coins, despite the fact that in the previously cited 1924 regulation it was specified that:

Article 9. The coins issued based on this regulation are legal tender, which can be used to pay debts:
gold coins - without restrictions, silver coins - up to an amount of 100 zloty for each payment, nickel and bronze coins, as well as coins issued based on Article 14 - up to an amount of 10 zloty for each payment.

The state counters take coins of all kinds in any amounts for each payment, except for those payments which in accordance with the provisions in force should be made in gold.

I do not know of any reports from the interwar period noting that the 10 zloty and 20 zloty coins were used in commercial transactions. Everything seems to suggest that these coins were only used for hoarding.

Finally, let's return to the issue of different colors of the gold used to mint these coins. Based on the previously quoted excerpts from the mint reports and considering the assessment of the amounts issued, one can infer that the majority of the Chrobry gold coins were minted after 1934. We can also find the following information in that year's mint report.

* the mint's income from the production of gold coins was specified - for 1926 and first quarter of 1927 (from this year onwards, the mint switched to a [different] reporting cycle - beginning from the 2nd quarter of each year).
[the table shows 10,700.00 zloty profit for the aforementioned period while all other fields, up to 1933/34, are blank]

* information regarding refining gold and silver was presented.

The weight of the waste material containing gold and silver accumulated at the Mint from 1927 and the [items] submitted by private persons for reprocessing totaled 9,330 kilos.
After proper preliminary preparations, this material was melted in [several] truns in a furnace with appropriate fluxes in the presence of lead.
This way, a concentration of noble metals in a lead alloy, weighing 1,440 kilos, was obtained.
The reprocessing of this alloy by means of cupelling was undertaken at the State Lead and Glass Works in Strzybnica, Upper Silesia, under the management of the Head of the Smelting Department of the State Mint.
As a result of this process, 618.5 kilos of gold and silver alloy was obtained, which was then reprocessed into 597.8 kilos of pure silver and 20.102 kilos of pure gold by means of electrorefining at the State Mint.

Obtaining ca. 20 kilo of gold is mentioned. Certainly, the mint continued refining gold and silver during the 1934-1939 period. Pure gold was obtained while the coins were made of 900 gold. Theoretically, the only components of this alloy were to be gold (90%) and copper (10%) but I do not think that one could avoid the addition of other elements in the copper which also came from different sources. That was probably the reason why different color "varieties" of the ten zloty and twenty zloty coins exist.

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