Interesting facts about coins. Interesting facts about the coins of Russia and the USSR. Russia: its own history of money

In our world, money constantly appears. In any country, in any currency and in any form, be it paper or metal money, but only thanks to them can we acquire something.

We want to introduce you closer to one of the options for money, with coins. And so some interesting facts about coins.

The information will be of interest to both experienced numismatists and novice treasure hunters who have picked up a metal detector for the first time and set out to detect in the field.

1 In the history of Athens there was a coin for which more than 300 thousand dollars were given at an auction.

2 V Ancient China, even before our era, poured coins in various forms, not only as we are used to seeing round ones. So coins were created in the form of knives, bells, keys, etc.

3 There was also a miniature coin, the weight of which was only 0.17 grams. There was such a thing in Russia and was equal to only 1/4 kopeck.

4 In the struggle for "beauty" won the Mexican coin, which is decorated with the national emblem of Mexico and the Aztec calendar.

5 In 2011, the world was able to see a coin that weighs more than a ton and is made of over 99% gold. Poured such a whopper in Australia, in the city of Perth. It is equal to 1 million Austrian dollars, and its price is more than 54 million US dollars.

6 Did you know that coins can act not only as money, but also "judge" the quality of alcohol? This is how people in Germany taste beer. They put a coin on the froth and if it doesn't go to the bottom of the glass, then the beer is of excellent quality.

7 In 1740, there was a coin in Nepal that weighed 0.002 grams. They made it from other coins, larger ones.

8 Did you know that the word "penny" exists thanks to Ivan the Terrible? The prince with a spear was depicted on silver money, and Grozny created a decree, from which it followed that such coins should be called "penny".

9 Coins also serve as a talisman for many nations. So, for example, Americans leave a dollar for luck from their first salary, Germans make holes in coins and wear them around their necks in the form of a pendant, and Russians throw a coin or two into the sea to return to their favorite place.

10 Modern coins are created not only to be able to pay for purchases, but also to make it a rarity and an expensive product, thanks to which you can create auctions and all kinds of "billed" events. Take a look at your mezzanine, perhaps there you will find something that has a price of more than a million. Not rubles, of course.

In Russian history, and Soviet history too, there are many interesting facts about money and coins. When did they start minting their own money in Russia? When did paper money appear in Russia? The largest and smallest, the most expensive and the most unnecessary coins. From what, in addition to paper and metal, money was made in Russia. If convicts have their own currency? Why is the sower golden? You will learn all this from this article.

• Russia has its first money were introduced immediately after the adoption of Christianity in the X century. Before that, in the country, as a means of payment, they went, foreign coins: from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Russia urgently needed its own national currency.

Byzantine gold and silver coins were taken as the basis. It is noteworthy that gold coins were immediately exported abroad, while silver coins were most often counterfeited using various non-precious alloys.

• The smallest coin in the world a penny (or half a day). Its face value was 1/4 kopeck, and the weight was 0.17 grams.

• The largest and heaviest coin in the history of Russia was issued in 1725. The weight of the coin was as much as 1.6 kg. The coin itself was made of copper, 18x18 cm in size, and 5 mm thick. The denomination, oddly enough, the coin was only 1 ruble.

• In history modern Russia considered the largest silver coin issued by the Bank of Russia in 1999. Weight, neither more nor less, as much as 3 kg. And although its face value was only 10 thousand rubles, its real value is hundreds of times more.

• Unnecessary money. In 1825, after the death of Emperor Alexander I, his eldest son Konstantin was to take the throne. Coins with the image of the new Emperor were minted. They were only waiting for the coronation, after which the coins can be officially put into circulation. But at the last moment, the heir renounced the throne in favor of his younger brother Nicholas. All coins urgently had to be sent for remelting.

• The most expensive money in Russia from gold. They are issued annually by the Central Bank. Each coin weighs exactly 1 kg. The nominal value is 10,000 rubles. And although they are legal tender, the coins are immediately bought up by banks and collectors.

• leather money. In Alaska at the beginning of the 19th century (then Alaska belonged to Russia), money was printed from sealskin. 10,000 copies of such money were printed (or made) in the amount of about 50,000 rubles. Money was in circulation on a par with official Russian money for almost 2 decades. Now such leather money is the dream of numismatists. They are willingly bought up, and by weight equivalent to the cost of gold of the same weight.

• In Russia, in the post-war period, in order to strengthen confidence in the banknotes of the new country, in 1923 they began to issue golden chervonets - "sower". Each coin contained 7.2 g of pure gold. Coins were issued right up to 1982. The only coin that was willingly accepted by all countries of the world as a means of payment. Now the cost of such a coin on the market is about 150 - 300 thousand rubles.

• First paper money appeared in Russia by decree of Catherine the Great. 25, 50, 75 and 100 ruble bills were printed. Immediately after the release, the first fakes began. Counterfeiters simply corrected one digit in 25 ruble bills, immediately receiving 75 rubles. Fearing to undermine confidence in the new type of money among the population, Catherine did not pursue counterfeiters. All 75-ruble banknotes (real and fake) were simply withdrawn from circulation and destroyed.

• Few people know, but in Soviet Russia, in parallel with the rubles, there were also so-called " birch" money. On them it was possible to buy goods in the famous Beryozka store, where you could buy scarce goods. And although the resale of such money was considered speculation at that time (15 years in camps with confiscation of property), the demand for them was simply crazy. They bought at a rate 5-10 times higher than the official one.

• In places not so remote, prisoners were not allowed to have money on hand. Then they created their camp money who only went there. The administration of the camps changed Soviet rubles from prisoners for camp money, and at a "special" overvalued rate, thereby getting a good profit on the exchange.

Do you know where the name "penny" came from? On the silver money that Ivan the Terrible ordered to be minted, there was an image of the Grand Duke with a spear in his hand, and personally John ordered to call them "spear money".

10th place: The heaviest metal coins are Swedish copper coins rectangular shape worth 10 dalers, which were produced in the 18th century. One such coin weighs 19 kilograms 710 grams, and the royal seal is stamped on the corners.

8th place: The strangest name has a Venetian coin of the sixteenth century. It's called "newspaper". And, by the way, it was she who was at first, and newspapers appeared later. In 1556, the first printed publication (Written News) appeared in Venice, and its cost was determined in one newspaper. They got used to it so much that the name of the coin was transferred to the name of the edition.

7th place: The largest coin in value was the Indian minted in 1654. gold coin 200 mohurs, weighing 2 kilograms 177 grams and 136 millimeters in diameter. The imprint of the coin is kept in the British Museum in London. The only known copy of the coin disappeared in the Indian state of Bihar in 1810.

6th place: The largest amount ever paid for a single coin is $314,000. For this amount, a silver decadrachm from ancient Athens was sold at an auction in Zurich.

5th place: The smallest Russian coin in value and weight. They called her half money. A polushka was equal to one fourth of a penny, and its weight was only 0.17 grams.

4th place: The largest Russian coin was issued by order of Catherine 1 in 1725. This is a huge square copper ruble measuring 18 by 18 centimeters and 5 millimeters thick. The coin weighed 1 kilogram 636 grams! The largest modern silver coin was issued in Russia in 1999. She weighs 3000 grams.

3rd place: The heaviest Russian gold coin. This is an imperial, minted by order of Catherine II. It was equal to 10 rubles and weighed 11.61 grams. The heaviest modern gold coin was issued in China, it weighs 5 kg.

2nd place: The only Soviet gold coin. This is a gold Soviet chervonets. Golden chervonets began to be minted in 1923, and it was the only hard currency in Soviet history. By the way, the minting of these chervonets continued until the 80s.

1 place: Can money ever be needed? It's hard to believe, but in Russia there were the most useless coins in history. In 1825, after the death of Alexander I, but before the next coronation (when no one knew who would take the Russian throne), a trial coin was minted with the image of Alexander's eldest son, Konstantin. However, Constantine renounced the throne in favor of his brother Nicholas, and the entire circulation of coins had to be melted down.

Judging by the references in chronicles, the ruble appeared at the end of the 13th century. But then it was not a coin, but a silver ingot, reaching up to 20 cm in length and weighing about 200 grams.

The word "ruble" is a relative of the word "cut". And it is no coincidence: a two-hundred-gram silver piece was indeed cut off from a more massive ingot - the hryvnia.

The equivalent of almost any monetary unit is considered to be 100 coins. This tradition first appeared in Russia in the 16th century. The reform carried out by Elena Glinskaya equated the ruble to ten hryvnias, and the dime to ten kopecks. But for a long time, the ruble existed only "virtually", as a unit of account. It was first minted under Alexei Mikhailovich, and the mass production of pure silver rubles was launched only under the “carpenter king” Peter the Great, in 1704. Then the content of valuable metal in coins reached almost one hundred percent. But by the second half of the century, the ruble consisted of only 2/3 of silver.

It remained silver until the end of the 19th century. And in 1897, according to the "Gold Standard", it began to be produced from gold. Gold tsarist ruble was a very valuable currency. For five or ten of these coins, one could buy a good cow - milking and capable of bearing offspring.

Issuing "iron" rubles is a very unprofitable business. The production costs of each far exceed its face value.

Today, pronouncing the word "chervonets", we mean a monetary unit worth 10 rubles. But in the 19th century, the equivalent of a chervonets was three rubles. Its rise in price occurred in 1923, when a gold Soviet chervonets with the image of a sower was issued in the USSR.

Finance Minister Witte did not like the word "ruble" at all. At the end of the 19th century, he proposed to replace it with a more homespun one - "Rus" and even "Rus". But his opinion was not heeded.

In 1915 in Russia, many players in gambling got caught in a scam with the so-called "Brut ruble". This paper bill was named after the cashier Brutus, who allegedly signed the money, and then, being in a state of insanity, committed suicide. There was a rumor among the players that a real Brut ruble supposedly brings good luck, you just have to bet on it. Naturally, everyone rushed in search of the ill-fated ruble, and the scammers skillfully profited from human greed, offering "the same one" for fabulous money.

The modern Russian ruble appeared in 1993. At the same time, due to the depreciation of money, all without exception the citizens of Russia became millionaires: they paid in the thousands and received a salary in the millions. With the onset of 1998, a thousand became equal to 1 ruble. Since then, it has not been changed any more.

Our contemporaries contemptuously call the ruble "wooden". But in 1961 its value was equal to almost a gram of gold. In its golden years, both literally and figuratively, it was a more expensive monetary unit than the dollar. And for the first time sharply lost ground in 1991.

It is immortalized not only in history, but also in monumental buildings. Monuments of this currency, installed in Dimitrovgrad and Tomsk, are considered local attractions. But the Estonians, breaking with the Soviet past, literally buried him, setting up a tombstone for him.

The ruble is the modern currency Russian Federation, the Republic of Belarus, and Transnistria. Same way Russian ruble has circulation in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In the past, the ruble was and was in circulation in the Russian republics and principalities, the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the Russian kingdom, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Russian Empire, RSFSR (1917-1923), Soviet Union (1923-1991), Latvia (1992-1993), Ukraine (1991-1992), Tajikistan (1995-2000).

I offer some interesting facts about the ruble, which will be interesting for everyone to know.

1. The first mention of the ruble is found in the Novgorod birch bark at the endXIIIcentury. The ruble was a silver ingot up to 20 cm long and weighing about 200 grams, which was cut off from the hryvnia.

2 . The first symbol of the ruble appeared inXVII century and was used until the middle of the 19th century, it was written above or next to the amount to which it referred. The symbol was the intersection of the letters R and Y, with the R rotated 90° counterclockwise.

3. In 1704, Russia was the first in the world to decimalize, that is, it equated one coin to 100 others (1 ruble to 100 kopecks).

4 . Everyone is used to the fact that "chervonets" is 10 rubles. However, initially this name was applied to gold coins with a face value of 3 rubles, which were issued after the reform of 1701. The modern concept comes from the Soviet gold ducat "Sower", released in 1923.

5. In 1897, Russia almost lost the ruble as a monetary unit. And all because of the fact that the Minister of Finance S.Yu. Witte proposed to put into circulation a new currency with the name "Rus" or "Rus".

6. After the 1961 reform, the Soviet ruble was backed by gold and was equal to 0.987412 grams of gold, but there was no way to exchange rubles for gold. Currently, the ruble does not have a gold equivalent.

7. In the mid-90s, many Muscovites received strange offers over the phone to purchase an ordinary banknote for an amount 5 times higher than the face value. Many agreed to this offer, since the number on the banknote corresponded to the seven-digit telephone number of the buyer.

8 . There are monuments to the Russian ruble, they are installed in Tomsk on Novosobornaya Square, and in Dimitrovgrad on Soviet Square. But the Estonians went even further and erected a headstone for the ruble.

9 . The cost of producing Russian coins up to 5 rubles exceeds the face value of these coins. For example, to mint a coin with a face value of 5 kopecks, you need to spend 71 kopecks.

10 . Banknote of 100 rubles with the image Bolshoi Theater, is the sexiest bill in the world! So says the book of records of Russia.

11. In Russia, ruberoid is made from old money. Experts say that it lasts much longer.

12 . According to experts' forecasts, in a few years in Russia the share of 5,000 denomination banknotes will be 15% of all banknotes.