“This is an extremely rare find”

Volodymyr-Volynsky History Museum holds the coin, or rather its fragment, now, as the local resident Volodymyr Senchyshak donated his find to the institution. When drawing water from a spring near the village of Zymne, where the Kyivan princes once had their winter residence, he saw what looked to him like a glass shard. Senchyshak decided to remove it from the water, and made a sensational discovery.

“Our museum has a rich numismatic collection, ranging from Roman denarii to a set of silver Ukrainian coins donated by Viktor Yushchenko, back when he was not even the president of Ukraine yet, but served in the Cabinet under Kuchma,” the director of the history museum Volodymyr Stemkovsky said. “The recently found coin is interesting because the coins of this kind only very rarely came into circulation in this region, for they were minted at Kyivan Rus’s mint in the city of Kyiv, its then capital. We can put forward different explanations for it coming to the banks of Luha River. We see the coin as valuable because it is the first Ukrainian money of the first Ukrainian state, minted by Prince Volodymyr the Great. This is an extremely rare find. European museums hold five to eight gold coins of this type and no more than 150 silver ones, similar to this one. It is the only such coin in the museums of western Ukraine. Some may be held by private collectors, although even this is unlikely, since they are too rare.”