Unusual mint tokens from Uzbekistan

[gxseries]

Uzbekistan is a rather interesting country if you are keen to collect coins from. You might have seen some news recently regarding the most worthless circulating coin issed by Uzbekistan in 1994 1 tiyin. Not too sure what it is worth but I really doubt if it's still circulating. 1 som at today's exchange rate is worth only 0.000469550 USD (from xe.com)

 

The first series issued in 1994 has a lot of varieties - all denomination has at least one different variety including coins issued by Pobjoy mint. Leaving that aside, little is known about Uzbekistan's national mint. Appearently it was setup in 1992 (more to follow about this) but as of why no coins were struck in the early days and Pobjoy mint was contracted to struck coins in 1994, there's a lot of questions to be asked. I've also tracked down the official website of the mint (took me a good couple of years) and it's here: http://davlat-belgisi.uz/index.php?lang=en

 

Note - almost all commemorative silver coins issued by Uzbekistan are considered to be relatively scarce as they are just too difficult to find especially the earlier issues.

 

I've recently obtained an interesting mint token and this seems to be the offical set from the Davlat Belgisi. In tatters though - haven't seen another one around. Davlat Belgisi owns the paper mill and printing company - probably similar to the Goznak in Russia.

 

 

As you can see the tokens, it seems that they refer to the year "1992". I suspect that this would be the year when the mint was first open. As of what the dates mean on the two tokens, I have no idea. Probably the date of when the tokens were struck or one of them might refer to the opening of the mint.

 

Now this is something that I had to queston - I don't think I've ever seen bi-metal coins / tokens from Uzbekistan and this is the first. Uzbekistan has been striking coins from 1997 to 2002 and then in 2004, 2009 and 2011. I just can't help to think that there has been a possibility to strike commemorative coins in bi-metal but didn't.

 

Nevertheless - something interesting that I've picked up I guess.