A complete record of every coin minted for Poland, from the first Piast denars of the tenth century to the złoty coins of present day.
Over a millennium of monetary history, shaped by dynasty, war, partition, and rebirth.
c. 966 – 1370
Poland's founding dynasty issued its earliest documented denars — the PRINCES POLONIE type — under Bolesław I Chrobry around the year 1000. The MISICO-type denars long attributed to Mieszko I are reassigned by modern scholarship to his grandson Mieszko II Lambert. The tradition then endured for centuries.
1370 – 1386
A sixteen-year bridge between dynasties: Hungary's Angevin kings ruled Poland, and the teenage queen Jadwiga — crowned Rex Poloniae in her own right — issued some of the rarest silver denars of medieval Poland before her marriage to Jagiełło launched the Jagiellonian line.
1386 – 1572
The Jagiellons presided over a golden age of Polish coinage. Sigismund I's 1526–1528 reform (formalised by the 1528 minting ordinance) unified monetary standards across a vast realm, introducing the trojak and szóstak; the first Polish talar followed at Toruń in 1533.
1569 – 1795
The largest state in Europe produced a complex and often troubled coinage — from the elegant gold ducats of Sigismund III to Jan Kazimierz's debased copper boratynka, and ending with Stanisław August's 1766 reform that gave Poland its most rational coinage system — 1 talar = 8 złoty = 240 grosz, anchored on the Cologne grzywna — in its final decades.
1795 – 1918
With Poland erased from the map by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, coins bearing Polish inscriptions became acts of cultural resistance and national memory.
1918 – 1939
Reborn after 123 years of partition, Poland issued some of its most artistically distinguished coinage, including commemorative silver pieces and the iconic Piłsudski portraits.
1939 – 1945
The Nazi General Government imposed zinc-coin scrip on occupied Poland, while inside the Łódź Ghetto the Judenrat issued aluminum mark tokens and a small body of camp scrip survives from Auschwitz. Each piece is a document of suffering and defiance.
1944 – 1989
Under communist rule, the White Eagle lost its crown. Forty-five years of PRL coinage records the tension between official ideology and Polish national identity on every design.
1989 – present
With democracy restored and the crown returned to the eagle, modern Poland has produced a celebrated series of collector coins alongside its everyday circulation coinage.
Six coins that changed hands at moments that changed history.
Piast Dynasty · legacy attribution c. 966–992
Long catalogued as Poland's first coin, the MISICO-type denar is reassigned by modern scholarship to Mieszko II Lambert — Mieszko I's grandson — struck c. 1013–1024 during the reign of his father Bolesław I Chrobry. The record is preserved under Mieszko I for the founding-of-Polish-coinage narrative.
Piast Dynasty · c. 1367–1370
The first Polish grosz, introduced by the king who "found Poland built of wood and left it built of stone." This coin standardized Polish currency and brought it in line with the European monetary system.
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth · 1663–1666
The notorious debased silver coin, officially valued at 30 groszy but containing silver worth barely 12, that sparked a financial crisis, trade boycotts, and ultimately contributed to the fall of the Commonwealth.
Second Polish Republic · 1934
The most recognizable coin of interwar Poland, struck in silver and bearing the stern profile of Marshal Józef Piłsudski. Issued one year before his death, it became an instant commemorative piece of the man who restored Polish independence.
WWII & Occupation · 1943
Struck in aluminum-magnesium alloy for use exclusively within the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, this coin circulated among the roughly 165,000 Jews held there at peak — a currency redeemable only for meager rations. It is one of the most haunting artifacts in the history of numismatics.
Third Republic · 1990
The first coin struck after the fall of communism to bear the crowned White Eagle, its crown having been suppressed for 45 years under the Polish People's Republic. A small brass coin carrying the weight of national restoration.
Why this database exists, and how it was built.
The White Eagle Project began as a personal effort to answer a question that turned out to have no satisfying answer elsewhere: what is a complete, sourced, historically contextualised record of every coin ever minted for Poland? Existing catalogues, including Kopicki, Parchimowicz, and the NBP archives, are essential but scattered, often out of print, and rarely contextualised for readers who are historians first and numismatists second.
Wherever possible, entries draw on at least two independent primary or secondary sources — auction records, museum holdings, mint archives, and scholarly monographs — and the majority do; coins with a single source or with sources still being verified are flagged for follow-up. Mintage figures are given with explicit confidence levels (exact, estimated, or unknown) rather than presented as certainties they are not. Auction-realized prices are catalogued for a growing subset of coins; this database does not aim to be a dealer's price guide and does not show retail "ask" prices.
The project covers … coin types across nine historical eras, from the earliest Polish silver denars of Bolesław I Chrobry around the year 1000 to the collector issues of the National Bank of Poland. It does not aim to be a dealer's price guide. It aims to be the reference a historian, a student, or a curious person can trust.
All content is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Source data and errata corrections are welcomed via the contact page.