Coins With Very Narrow Minting Time Frame, From Ancient To Modern Times

I have posted this coin before, though not, I believe, in a separate photo - it is an example of perils of automatically converting dates, and incidentally a world record... but you'll soon see why.


The year 7208 of the creation of the world was supposed to be a relatively unremarkable year when it originally started on the first of September.

This was, however, completely put on its head when, only four months in, Peter Alexeevich, the local Tsar, proceeded to declare that a good Christian country should count its years by the Christian calendar, and that due to this reason the year 7208 is hereby abolished, to be replaced by the year 1700 of the Christian era, to start on the first of January.
That having been done, he continued to figure out all the other ways in which he could drag his country kicking and screaming into the eighteenth century.

The Moscow mint (well, one of them - forgot which one), however, did manage, in that weird four-month year, to make some dies with the 7208 date, and strike some coins with them - tiny silver kopeks, obviously, they didn't really make anything else in the 7200s, anyway.
(There was a brief issue of even tinier silver dengas in the 7190s, which didn't really amount to much.)

Then they heard that the date was now 1700, oh, and incidentally, they were also supposed to make some large copper kopek fractions (from the denga down to the half polushka, a fiddly piece worth 1/8 of a kopek that was apparently quickly abolished for its sheer worthlessness).
So they went around making new dies, and stopped with their 7208 coins, because now that was the wrong year.

They were probably not aware (though might well have guessed if they ever needed to) that the year 7208 was now the largest calendar year to be featured on any coin ever - which it somehow still remains today.



Peter I, wire kopek, 10x7 mm, dated CH=(7)208 [AM]=1699/1700 AD (normally, this would convert to 1700, but in this case it's obviously 1699).
The legend (very little of which is visible) comes out to something along the lines of [Tsar Peter A]LEX[eevich of] ALL [the Ru]SS[ias] (I might have missed a word or two).
Forgot the catalog reference, sorry.


As mentioned above, this coin has a minting period of less than 12 months - the last four months of 1699 AD, specifically.

Tiny silver kopeks would continue to be made for the next eighteen years or so, fourteen of them side-by-side with the new large copper kopek (which started in 1704), before being officially abolished near the end of Peter's reign (the large coppers, ironically, won't stay much longer - from 1730 to 1750 there were no kopek coins made at all).

It would take another several decades - until the reign of Elizabeth at the very earliest - to finish the process of dragging the country kicking and screaming into the seventeenth century and start dragging it into the eighteenth century.


...My next entry will probably be a much more recent coin. Assuming I would be able to take a photo of it, anyway (it's so extremely shiny that I suspect there would be a lot of glare).

Well, they are, but the second letter is not the modern Cyrillic H (corresponding to Latin N), but an archaic form of the Cyrillic letter [reversed N] that sounds like the Latin I (but actually distantly related to the Latin letter H, and not to be confused with the actual Cyrillic letter I, which had gone out of use in Russian).

It might be helpful - especially if you're familiar with ancient coins - to think of those as Greek letters (sigma and eta).
When Cyril and Methodius created the Cyrillic alphabet based on the Greek, they adopted the Greek numeral system as well (with later minor changes for the particularly useless letters).
So the numeric values are the same as the Greek ones: sigma=200, eta=8.

The large copper coins mentioned were, in fact, also dated with letters (though now in the Christian era); the last letter-dated Russian coins (small copper 1/4 kopek pieces) were made in 1721 (which came out as A[psi]KA, or, on one weird transitional type, 17K1).

Nice one, January! I will have to get around to getting at least one of these tiny little things one of these days.

Another short run, the Lafayette dollars were all struck on Dec 14, 1899.

Cross-posting this one from the 4th edition HFBCWG

Japan 500 yen
Showa 64 (Jan 1-7 1989)




I am not entirely clear on when these were made, because they are surprisingly not especially rare for supposedly being made in the span of 1 week before Hirohito died of cancer. Heisei gen begins on 1/8/1989 and comprises most of the mintage for that year, and all set issues.