Hi everyone, Lately I've become in possession of a medal/token with Cyrillic script on it. I've found it in a abandoned shack in a nearby forest. I live in Flanders so the finding was a bit awkward. After quite a while I found out that the man depicted was the same man as here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khatyn_massacre In the hamlet of Khatyn in Belarus (about 60km north of Minsk) the whole community of about 150 people was burnt alive by German collaborators during WW II, except for this man on the medal Yuzif Kaminsky who survived the tragedy. However, i can't find any more information on the internet about the medal itself. I suppose of course it's a commemorative medal, but because the language is Belarussian/Byelorussian/...(i've tried several things) i'm not able to find a translating tool that can give me any translation of what is says on the edges. Does somebody have a clue if it's very recent or rather from the 40's? It's still in a very good condition. It's not iron, nor it is gold unfortunately can't really figure it out actually..just alloy. Furthermore a translation would be great too. (I took an extra greyscale scan too to make the reading more easy, http://www.mypicx.com/04052010/Khatyn/ for a larger pic) Have a fine week, Eikmans
Welcome to Coin Talk, Eikmans! As for your medal, well, I do not speak Belarusian either, but hey, we have the Internet. First, I don't think the piece is from WW2. The memorial was built in the late 1960s, and apparently that includes the monument depicted on your piece. See http://khatyn.by/en/about/ Now if you enter (some of) the text on your piece into a search engine, you'll find this for example: http://www.nn.by/index.php?c=ar&i=29436&p=1&c2=calcym&combo_calmonth=9&combo_calyear=2009 and the quote "Свет праз вякі не бачыў жудасцяў гэткіх на зямлі нашай" which is apparently from that memorial site. Machine translation turns that into "The world through the centuries has not seen such horror in our land." Blame Google if the translation is bad. Christian
Hi Christian, I probably did something wrong when entering the cyrillic script because a normal Russian-English translating tool didn't give me anything - that's why i thought that it was important that it is Belarussian on the medal. Thanks for your time!
Could be due to differences between Russian and Belarusian; another possible reason is that using both Latin and Cyrillic characters in one word gets us odd results. By the way, the memorial in Khatyn I find quite impressive, as by and large it is quite different from the often pompous style of such sites. Whether this particular place was picked by the USSR because the name is so similar to Katyn ... who knows. Just out of curiosity, is the other side of your medal blank? Christian
No, it isn't, it depicts a clock. I took a quick scan. What I'm wondering most about is how the medal ever came to such an odd place in Flanders. Probably from visiting the site in Khatyn, but I don't know many people from my region doing such trips. We'll never know
Ah, thanks for posting the other side too. Looks like a combination of a bell and flames to me. Well, the fire symbolizes how people died there, and the bell makes sense as all bells at the memorial site (see http://khatyn.by/images/map_en/i_map.html ) ring every 30 seconds. Sure an interesting find, at a strange place, and I hope you can find out more (e.g. the "date" and composition/alloy) about the piece! Christian
