This coin is from my collection. It is a 1726 grivna (10 kopeks) of Catherine I. It is made of low grade silver, a debased coin made to create more in face value from the silver used.

These are tough to find in any condition and I am fortunate to have this example.

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Great coin. It's interesting how they used Braille-like dots to represent 10.

WOW that's nice!!!

A similar coin I saw in a catalogue was in Dmitrii Markov just the beginning of this year - but that was in XF+ condition and it blew over 5.5 grand...

Thanks, I'm very proud of this one

The 10 dots were intended to indicate the denomination of 10 kopeks (or "grivna") for the illiterate.

Yes, it sure is a proud coin to be of. Uzedenikov has even marked it as very rare

Now are you going to tell me that you do have that ultra UNC Peter II ruble there too?

I wouldn't be too suprised but rather if you do have it

Mine is only a holed Fine, so it's hardly in that league, but the coin is very hard to find in any condition. I've never seen an XF, not even a picture. The GM plates don't count because they are plaster casts, not coins (that's why they aren't toned).

Yes I know, I haven't seen one with my real eyes before. You can take a look at the catalogue at here: http://www.russian-coins.net/, under Auction X and download the whole 10mb file if you can. You will need a pdf reader though. That catalogue has plenty of decent photos...

No, I don't, but I wish I did. My avatar coin is actually an extremely rare pattern ruble of Peter II. The only other known example of a Peter II pattern ruble is a well worn example fished out of circulation that ended up in the Grand Duke's collection.

The picture is from a recent auction where it sold for $230,000 ($200,000 plus the juice). That's a lot of money, but considering its beauty and rarity, it's not hard to imagine it selling even higher someday.

Thanks for the link. I'll download it later.

What a wonderfull coin
As said above, those early milled coins are very difficult to find in any grade, you are a very lucky man

Thank you, Tane. There seems to be a lot of nice Russian collections in Finland and other countries of Northern Europe.

I've been collecting Russian coins for many years. I had the good fortune to obtain some significant pieces when there was much less competition for them and prices were significantly lower than they are today. This coin is one of them.

GX, you can explain me please the legend of the signs for rarity fron Uzdenikov, please?
Thanks!

This is the old Russian rarity scale:

no symbol = common
dot = scarce
line = rare
dot-line = very rare
dot-line-dot = extremely rare


Uzdenikov supplements that scale with the following ratings:

ЕД = unique (according to the available documents)
!! = several examples known, but excessively rare
!? = described in some old document, but no original specimens are now known

Sometimes you might also see
dot-line-dot-dot = excessively rare
but Uzdenikov does not use it (at least not in the first or second editions of his book).

This coin is #661 in the second edition of Uzdenikov's book "Russian Coins" and is rated there as "very rare" (dot-line).

Yup, that's how it is.

Note that Uzdenikov is extremely critical when he comes to quoting such rarity, so all my Russian coins that you can see on omnicoin aren't quite that "rare" as you might believe

If I am not wrong, the mintage number is just within a few thousands, like around 5000 max. It is almost as rare as the Kolyvan gold coin commemorative coin...

Thank you for the info!