The Money History Museum

When reading books as a child, I often came across obscure names of money: piastres, ecu, a quarter-kopeck, doubloons, sesterces, katenkas, etc. and when I matured, I began to read special literature to find out what kinds of coins and banknotes they were. Then I began to gather a collection centered on monetary history. First Russian coins, then antique, medieval coins, thalers, etc., and since there was no money history museum in Russia, I decided to create it.

The history of money is the history of human civilization, and the coins are silent witnesses to this story. We tell it to our visitors, and we give them some ancient coins to touch.

Fifty stands and display cases compactly present artifacts that tell about the history of money from biblical times to the present: pre-coin forms of money, one of the first coins in world history, the Lydian stater (the Lydians, according to Herodotus, were the first to invent a coin), coins of ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, Byzantium, and the specific principalities of ancient Russia, coins of the Golden Horde, money from imperial Russia, a collection of thalers, a collection of US dollars, money from concentration camps and Jewish ghettos (these are the money-witnesses of the Nazi crimes), the first Soviet coins and banknotes, and much more.