Archaeologists from the Burgas Museum were able to find a medieval silver coin that has the depictions of a saint and Siberian king on one side and Jesus on the other side.
Coin With Depictions of Jesus and Medieval Siberian King
The centuries-old coin was filled with interesting depictions. On one side, there is a depiction of the Serbian king Stefan Uroš II Milutin who remarkably expanded his rule. Alongside this depiction was that of St. Stephen.
Stefan Uroš II Milutin, who is also referred to as Holy King Milutin, reigned from 1282 up until 1321. During his remains, he was able to remarkably expand the Serbian kingdom across southeastern Europe. He had around five marriages, with one of his wives being a princess of Bulgaria. Milutin later got canonized to be a saint. At present, his relics are kept inside St. Nedelya Church in the capital of Bulgaria.
Julian Baker, who is the assistant keeper for medieval and modern coins at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology and who did not participate in the excavation, explains that as for the depiction of Jesus, the coin serves as a direct copy of the seated Christ on coins from Venice. Venetian coins were known to be among the most stable currencies across the Middle Age due to their silver weight consistency.
Venetian coins started depicting a seated Christ during the late 1200s. The depiction was then similarly copied to coins that were minted under the Byzantine Empire. Baker explains that the seated Christ became quite an iconographical and prominent device across the 900s and 1000s.
Depictions of Jesus on medieval coins were quite common. Some experts have also interpreted that the seat depicted is a throne.
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Common Coin
The coin finding marks the first of its kind in the town of Rusokastro, which had the fortress during the period the coin was minted. The finding suggests that the circulation of the coin was larger than previously thought.
The exact coin is not quite unusual, as it was a common coin that the Serbian kingdom produced during a time when they could mint coinage in bulk with the help of the silver mines inside its territory. These coins can be commonly spotted across the southern Balkans and mostly across the western half of certain countries, including Greece and Serbia.
Archaeologists at the site are continuing with the excavation, while artifact analysis is still ongoing.
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