The Hermitage guide

The Hermitage collection has also profited from various finds. Many ancient coins in the Museum stem not from private collections and the Kunstkammer (Peter the Great’s Cabinet of Curios), but from hoards discovered at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With the founding of the Imperial Archaeological Commission in 1859, an increasing number of hoards found their way to the Hermitage. (However, in keeping with the practice prevailing in the nineteenth century, hoards were usually not preserved as complete historical collections; only some rare specimens were selected from them, while the remainder was melted down. At the turn of the century this practice changed, and numismatic finds began to be regarded as documentary evidence. Since the 1920s every hoard has been preserved in its entirety.) In 1898, for example, a hoard was uncovered during the repair of the choir-stalls in the Kievo-Pecherskaya Lavra. The earliest of its coins was the unique gold medallion of Constans II (A.D. 337—350), while the latest was minted in 1702. The hoard contained 6,198 gold coins and medals weighing twenty-seven kilograms and forty-three grammes, and 9,890 silver coins with a total weight of 273 kilograms. This hoard has provided the Hermitage with numerous interesting ducats and talers of different origin, including the unique Polish ten-ducat piece of Stephen Báthory, struck in 1580. In addition, the hoard yielded 232 talers with the Russian counter-marks of 1655, known in Russia as yefimki.

In 1934 hunters digging up a badger’s den in a forest on one of the tributaries of the Pasha River near the village of Vikhmiaz, in the Ladoga area, came upon a bronze cauldron full of small silver coins — tenth- and eleventh-century denarii minted in England, France, Italy, Hungary, Czechia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Germany. The hoard was placed in the Hermitage. It was found to contain a great many rare and even hitherto unknown specimens. Thus, a denarius with the name of Florentius could have been struck only by Florentius I, Count of Holland (1049—1061), since the hoard dates from the late eleventh century. The discovery of this coin made it possible to prove that the medieval coinage of Holland had begun over one and a half century before the date generally accepted. A denarius from Hildesheim, dating from the mid-eleventh century and depicting the Church of St Michael, stems from the same hoard. The church was later reconstructed and, prior to the discovery of the Hermitage coin, its earliest appearance was known only from a wooden model of the seventeenth century. Other noteworthy coins in this hoard include the denarii struck in Echternach. When doing his research into the tenth- and eleventh-century coins of the Lower Lorraine and Friesland the German scholar Günther Albrecht made use of the material of most European collections except the Hermitage’s, of which he was apparently oblivious. However, in the Vikhmiaz hoard, the denarii coined by various mints in the Lower Lorraine and Friesland are extremely well represented: taken together, all the hoards mentioned by Albrecht contained almost as many denarii from Thuin, Dinant, Liège, and Remagen as the Vikhmiaz hoard alone.

The Shchumilov hoard of Oriental coins unearthed in 1927 in the Novgorod Region contained a commemorative dirhem of the Abbasid dynasty. One of the acknowledged gems of the Hermitage collection, this dirhem was issued in A.H. 195 (A.D. 810/ 811); the mint is not indicated. The device, rather unusual for a dirhem, features the name of Umdjafar Zubaydah, cousin and wife of the famous Caliph Harun al-Rashid, who was well known for her piety, philanthropy and brilliant poetic gift. Legend has it that she founded several towns and contributed to the construction of water-reservoirs and caravanserais during her pilgrimage to Mecca. Since Umdjafar Zubaydah was born in A.H. 145 (A.D. 762/763), this dirhem, dated AH 195, must have been minted in honour of her fiftieth birthday.

From 1852 onwards, samples of coins and medals struck at the St Petersburg Mint were sent regularly to the Hermitage. A certain portion of the coins, medals and orders now in the Museum was bought from various numismatic firms, such as the Hamburger and Hess Co. in Frankfurt-on-Main, the Kube Co. in Berlin, the Egger Co. in Vienna, the Rollin Co. in Paris, the Spink Co. in London, and the Schulman Co. in Amsterdam. Important accessions came to the Hermitage by way of exchange with the mint cabinets of Berlin, Jena, and Madrid.

After the victory of the October Revolution, during the difficult years of the Civil War and foreign intervention, the young Soviet state showed great concern for the preservation of historic and artistic treasures. Since 1921, by a special decree of the Soviet government all samples of coins, medals, orders, and badges issued by the Moscow and Leningrad Mints have been transferred to the Hermitage.