A rare and sought after vintage.
One of the most difficult coins of the Second Polish Republic.
Variant with a distance of 13 mm between LEX SALUS.
An above-average copy with fragments of mint luster in a delicate and even patina.
Jerzy Chałupki in his "Specialized catalog of Polish coins of the 20th and 21st centuries." Nike writes about five-zloty coins: "The order of the Ministry of the Treasury was for 28 million pieces of five-zloty pieces, which presented the mint with an extremely difficult task. In the initial period, the mint was unable to produce the appropriate number of discs on its own, much less ready-made coins. It was determined by trial and error. that the most appropriate sequence of disc production stages is: cutting discs from unbleached sheet metal, annealing, bleaching, encapsulation. However, it turned out that the discs prepared in this way are dull and the silver from their surface sticks to the punches during minting (one was transferred to the mint in Brussels).
Nike are the first mass-minted coins of the Second Polish Republic with an inscription on the edge. The inscription "SALUS REIPUBLICAE SUPREMA LEX" - the good of the Republic of Poland is the highest law - was intended to justify the recent May coup. Initially, the mint embossed the inscription on a machine in which the disc was rolled under great pressure on a flat plate with convex letters. The machine's efficiency was too low, so a new, more efficient device was developed in which the film with the inscription was in the shape of a disc. On some coins, characteristic "waves" are visible on the rim. In places where the letter was pressed deep into the disc on the edge, its surface became convex and accepted the stamp pattern better (in this case, the edge of the disc).
On Nike five-zloty coins, you can see various variants of the inscription on the edge.
The basic, most common two are:
I - the gap between LEX and SALUS is 10 millimeters,
II - the gap between LEX and SALUS is 18 millimeters.
There are also coins with this distance of 8 or 13 mm. Variant I can be found on Nikes minted both in Warsaw and Brussels. This confirms the information that discs from one source were used here and there - from England.
