I've posted this coin in other threads before, but I think this is the first time it got to feature in a How Far Back Can We Go...
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 seventeenth century.
The old Moscow mint at Kitay-gorod, 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 once the new dies were finished, 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.
...Tiny silver kopeks would continue to be made for the next eighteen years or so - since 1701 also at other newly created Moscow mints, and since 1704 side-by-side with the new large copper kopek - 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 one-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.
Russia, 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)
Obverse: horseman with spear right, tilde and letters CH (=date) below, dots around
Reverse: ΛEξ[...]/BCE[...]/CC[...]
Probably KG 1631; definitely KG 1629-33
Reverse translation: [Tsar Peter A]LEX[eevich of] AL[l the Ru]SS[ias] (give or take some minor details)
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Posted 05/09/2019 09:46 am
