Archaeologists in Smolensk have unearthed a significant 15th-century coin hoard that sheds new light on the city’s role as a strategic crossroads during the era of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The cache, discovered during routine construction work on Sobolev Street, contains 48 silver coins dating back more than 600 years.
The majority of the find consists of Prague groschen (the “Dollar of the Middle Ages”) Minted from the rich silver mines of Bohemia, these high-purity coins were so widely trusted and circulated from the Baltic to the Balkans that historians refer to them as the universal currency of the medieval period.
This discovery is only the second Lithuanian-era hoard ever documented in Smolensk. While modest in size, its diversity serves as a “monetary map,” illustrating how closely interconnected the economies of Central Europe, the Baltic, and the Steppe were during the Late Middle Ages.
Explore the discovery in greater detail in the full article on ArkeoNews.
