Counterfeit Late-sixteenth-century Tyrolean Thaler from the South-eastern Crimea

This article discusses a counterfeit Tyrolean thaler of the Erzherzog Ferdinand of Austria (1564–1595) minted in the period contemporary to him and discovered in the south-eastern Crimea (in the environs of the modern village of Grushevka, Sudak administrative area). This is high-quality counterfeit of a large-denomination European coin, made with a unique technology of soldering silver plates onto a base metal blank. Along with other counterfeits and authentic examples of foreign coins discovered in the Crimea, this find shows that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century money of various European issuers penetrated to the peninsula, and that, apparently, in the Early Modern Period, foreign currency took part in the coin circulation in the Taurica in this or that way along with the coins minted by the Crimean khans and Ottoman sultans.