When you purchase through linkup on our site , we may earn an affiliate military commission . Here ’s how it works .
A metal detectorist look for discarded tractor region on a Polish farm fall upon a completely different character of valuable metal : A spectacular stash of seventeenth - century coin buried beneath the territory .
The hoard — a Brobdingnagian stash of about 1,000 copper color coin — was found in later February near the small village of Zaniówka in eastern Poland , near the borders with Belarus andUkraine , by a local mankind , Michał Łotys .
Archaeologists think the clay jug containing the horde of coins was deliberately buried on a farm in the east of Poland in the second half of the 17th century.
Łotys was using a Modern metal detector to get hold spare piece for his sister ’s tractor ; and so when the legal instrument begin beeping in one of the farm ’s fields , he scraped away a stratum of the topsoil . That bring out the coins shed out of a humiliated corpse " siwak " — a jug in a local dash with one handle and a minute neck .
Using a metal detector to search for bury relics without a licence is illegal in Poland , and so Łotys contactedarchaeologistsin the nearby city of Lublin , about 95 miles ( 150 kilometers ) southeastern United States of Warsaw , who chew the fat the farm the next day .
Related : Stunning gem - covered gold earring discovered in 800 - year - old stash in Germany
Treasure hunters estimate the entire horde of about 1,000 copper coins would have been enough at the time to buy two pairs of shoes, or perhaps 20 gallons of beer.
Their investigating showed that the location of the hidden stash was clearly outlined on the surface of the territory , which indicated it had been buried there advisedly , according to a report in the Polish news outletThe First News .
Buried hoard
Dariusz Kopciowski , the theater director of Lublin ’s inheritance conservation agency , foretell in a Facebook poston March 2 that the hoard has about 1,000 Polish and Lithuanian copper coins minted in the seventeenth C .
oxidisation after about 400 years in the ground means all thecopper coins are now colored green ; and many have rust together in layer . But about 115 of the coins are escaped , and the entire hoard consider about 6.6 pound ( 3 kilograms ) , Kopciowski note .
Investigations show most of the coins were created between 1663 and 1666 in mints in Warsaw ; Vilnius in Lithuania ; and Brest , which is now in Belarus but was then part of the Polish - Lithuanian Commonwealth .
The horde contains about 1,000 small copper coins from the time of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Most of them were minted between 1663 and 1666.(Image credit: Paweł Ziemuk/WKZ Lublin)
According to the Polish metal detectorist websiteZwiadowca Historii , such coin are known as " boratynki " afterTito Livio Burattini , who was the director of the Kraków mint at that metre .
Burattini , an Italian , was a celebrated inventor and polymath who acquaint fuzz coin to the Polish - Lithuanian Commonwealth because they were much cheaper to make than the survive silvery coins of the realm ; and because its Department of the Treasury was devastated after year of war with Sweden , Russia and Cossacks .
The " boratynki " coin were ab initio popular , although Burattini was later accused of debasing the copper metal they were made of and harvest immense profits .
The copper coins are now green from oxidation, and many of them are corroded together in layers. The horde weighs about 6.6 pounds in total.(Image credit: Paweł Ziemuk/WKZ Lublin)
— Medieval coin cache could be one of the largest ever discovered in Scotland
— Gold coin hoard worth $ 300 KB find beneath kitchen trading floor in England
— Metal detectorist stumbles across Viking hoarded wealth stash in Norway
Copper coins were a popular innovation at the time. They were much cheaper to mint than the existing silver coins of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which were heavily debased and difficult to acquire.(Image credit: Paweł Ziemuk/WKZ Lublin)
For a start , they were n’t very worthful , which meant they could be used in everyday transactions ; the entire cache of 1,000 copper coins from Zaniówka would buy only " about two pairs of shoe " at the clock time , although they ’re deserving more now as historic token , Zwiadowca Historii reported .
The Zaniówka coin hoard will now be transferred to specialist at a museum in the nearby city of Biała Podlaska for further investigating , Kopciowski say .
fragment of the broken clay jug and several pieces of textile from the meter were also institute at the site , he said in the affirmation .
